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Making melted candy gingerbread ornaments was something I’ve wanted to try ever since viewing a beautiful four-sided, sweet-tasting red and white gingerbread house on Twitter a few years ago. It’s an eye-pleasing baking activity and a festive science experiment so I highly recommend giving the activity a go.
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Melted Candy Ornament Supplies
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Gather the following supplies for this simple candy science activity:
- red and/or green striped round peppermint candies
- metal gingerbread cookie cutters
- no-stick cooking spray
- parchment or wax paper
- cookie pans
- cutting board
- knife
- vegetable oil
- wooden skewer
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Melted Candy Gingerbread Ornament Tips
Before trying this minty STEAM activity, I read a few blog posts about making melted peppermint candy designs. This detailed Melted Peppermint Candy Ornaments post by onelittleproject.com was particularly helpful and had great tips.
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Making The Melted Candy Christmas Ornaments
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To make the melted gingerbread candy ornaments, start by picking out metal cookie cutters for the task. Generously sized gingerbread people and a house were my cookie cutters of choice.
Spray the cookie cutters with no-stick cooking spray.
Next, add parchment paper to one or more cookie pans and set the greased cookie cutters on the pans.
Then insert unwrapped red or green striped peppermint candies inside the cookie cutter shapes. For larger spaces, cut candies into halves or quarters on a cutting board and use the smaller pieces to fill in the gaps.
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Baking The Melted Candy Gingerbread Ornaments
To bake the candy gingerbread ornaments, set the oven temperature to 350 degrees.
Next, put the peppermint candy-filled cookie cutters in the oven and heat them for around six minutes.
Stay by the oven and make sure to turn the oven light on to view the candies melting. It’s okay to take a peek…the sweet creations won’t jump out of the oven. But they will melt down if they are in the oven too long.
When the candies are joined together and a little of the melted candy starts seeping around the cookie cutter edges, take the baking pans out of the oven.
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After around two minutes, dip a wooden skewer in vegetable oil and carefully make a little hole near the top of each decoration so a string can be drawn through. Then let the eye-catching creations cool for around fifteen minutes.
Before the ornaments cool completely, carefully pull away the sides of the cookie cutters from the candy shapes and gently push them out. Oh-so-carefully break off melted bits around the peppermint ornaments if there are any.
Let the beautiful striped ornaments cool completely.
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How The Melted Gingerbread Ornaments Turned Out
This is where I need to come clean. My candy gingerbread ornaments didn’t turn out perfectly. Each one had one broken bit. The red and white gingerbread person had two broken bits.
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But as a first try at making melted candy ornaments, I considered it a success. I determined afterward that I had left the candied shapes in the oven just a little too long (probably eight minutes) and needed to be even more careful in removing them from the cookie cutters after baking. So a second attempt would likely be more successful.
The activity did turn out well enough that I would confidently be able to introduce it to family members or a group of preschool students. The patterned ornaments were fun to put back together as mini puzzles, and they would be tasty treats broken down into small bits and shared. Broken ornaments could be crushed and infused with playdough or baked in a peppermint cookie recipe when the science experiment was over. And there could be a conversation about stripes, patterns, halves, quarters, and the smell and taste of peppermint.
Striped peppermint candies are economical to buy, and I’ll surely give this stunning melted candy gingerbread ornaments STEAM activity another go. How about you? Will you give it a try?
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More Peppermint Candy Activities
Christmas Peppermint Sensory Bin
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