The scent of Christmas – on a salt ornament

Natural, sustainable and simple fragrant salt dough decoration

This is a recipe for homemade scented salt dough garlands and ornaments. Handmade salt dough is easy to make with the children, and these also make great gifts to friends and family.

It is more than likely that the ingredients for this project are already in your cupboard, but if not, any off-licence or supermarket will carry these so these really are a no-fuss project to make by yourself if you would like a little self care Sunday, or prepare with the children after their afternoon nap and not to mention to get them in the festive mood, as these spices will instantly take you to the Christmas mood.

You can also make a wide variety of designs using different cookie cutters, and you can also paint them once baked. Using natural spices of ground cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg with a hint of sweet orange essential oil is the prefect autumn and holiday scent.

Preparing these will be a great base to creating new family traditions – if you have a young family it is important to find traditions that are easy to follow year after year. The great thing about these salt dough Christmas ornaments in that they last quite long if stored properly (wrapped up in tissue paper, stored in an airtight container) so as the years go by you can end up with a superb collection of handmade ornaments.

Also if you would prefer to prepare completely new ones every year you are more than welcome to, as these sustainable Christmas decorations will cause no harm even if they land in the bin, as they completely biodegrade. Keep the twine or the string you hang these on, and you have got yourself the most eco-friendly Christmas tree ornaments.

Here’s what you will need to create your Christmas salt dough ornaments:
260gr cups plain flour
130gr salt
130ml water
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground clove
2 tsp nutmeg
10 drops orange essential oil

Mix all the dry ingredients – the flour, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon, ground clove, nutmeg and slowly add the water until you have a workable piece of dough. Try to avoid reaching the consistency of gooey or sticky, start with a little bit less water and add if you need more.

Once you reached the desirable consistency, roll out the dough and cut out the desired shape that you want for your ornaments. Again, you can go so many different shapes and forms with star cookie cutters, heart cutters or simple round cookie cutter ornaments. If you are hanging your clay decoration ornaments, use a straw to make the holes as it seems to cause less stress to the ornament as it only cuts, rather than pushes.

Place the ornaments on a baking sheet and put in the oven at the lowest temperature possible. My oven was set to 170 degrees.
Bake the scented salt dough ornaments for 1 hour, then, flip them over and bake another hour.
Lastly, remove them from the oven and allow to cool. Then, be creative because you can leave them plain, paint them, create a garland, tie them on packages or simply use as ornaments.

We will decorate an entire tree this year just using the ornaments we make from this recipe. It will look so beautiful and will smell amazing!