Decorated Cinnamon Ornaments, Three Ways

Have you ever made the classic cinnamon ornaments? They are fun and easy to make and they smell absolutely amazing. I've made cinnamon ornaments a handful of times, but this time I wanted to experiment with decorating them in three different ways. The results were really interesting! Affiliate links below. 

Cinnamon Ornaments

Materials: 

• 1 container cinnamon (2.37 oz)
• 6 tablespoons applesauce
• plastic wrap
• Christmas cookie cutters
• straw
• needle file
• Folk Art paint, Titanium White
• Folk Art Dots, Whisper White
• Apple Barrel Paint Pens
• twine

Steps: 

Mix the cinnamon and 5 tablespoons of applesauce in a bowl. Add the remaining applesauce if needed to make a smooth ball of dough. (Note: Some people add a tablespoon or two of Elmer's Glue to the dough, allegedly to help the ornaments last longer. I don't find this necessary, but go ahead and try it if you want.)

Roll out dough between two sheets of plastic wrap, to approximately 1/4" thick. Peel off the top sheet of plastic wrap, then cut ornaments from the dough. Use a straw to poke a hole in the top of each. Transfer your ornaments to a baking sheet. Ball up the scrap dough and repeat the steps until the dough is gone. Bake the ornaments at 200°F for about 2 hours. (Alternately, you can air dry them on a wire rack. It will take a day or two.)

Use a needle file to smooth any rough edges. You can see that the tree ornament below has some extra material (especially on the bottom branches) that needs to be removed. This task only takes a minute or two and it smells amazing. 

This is what all of my ornaments looked like after filing. See how much cleaner the tree looks? (Bottom left). 

On to decorating! I used three different products by Plaid to decorate my ornaments. I used Dots for the gingerbread man, star, and dotted tree; the paint pen for the snowman and holly leaf; and the paint for the bell and the other tree. 

As I was decorating, I was comparing the merits of each method. I found the Dots most difficult to control, but you can't beat the vibrancy and coverage. With practice, I could probably do better than the uneven dots and lines I made. The paint pen was the easiest to control, perfect for little details, but I had to let the first coat dry and do a second coat in order to get full coverage. The paint had good opacity and it was relatively easy to make simple lines and designs with a liner brush. 

I let everything dry overnight and ended up with this: 

The ones done with the paint pen are slightly less vibrant, but look at those tiny details. Now that I've tried them all, I'd recommend the paint pen for children, the paint or a paint pen for teens, and the Dots for cake decorators and other people who have spent a lot of time practicing squeezing with uniform pressure. 

The final step is adding hangers to your ornaments. I like the look of twine with these, but you can use ribbon, cording, or whatever else you want. 

The ornaments will last indefinitely, but their scent will fade over time. There are two ways to keep them smelling just as good as when you made them. The first is to gently file the edges and back each year before hanging them on the tree. This will, of course, make the ornaments smaller over time and will eventually cause them to break. Alternately, you can add a tiny drop of cinnamon oil to the back of the ornaments.