Even the kids didn't want to eat them after the first bite. I used life savers like the recipe called for and crushed them with a mallet. I finally gave up and let my nephews and nieces have fun with it. No matter how thin I rolled out the "lead" when baking it swelled up and looked horrid. When I used a scant amount of flour it was overly dry. The dough was tacky after 12 hours in the fridge.
That being said - it was a great idea and I will probably make the ornaments using a butter cookie dough. Definitely needs more butter and probably some white sugar as well. We rolled them in sugar and flattened them to make a gingersnap type cookie, but it was still awful. This was a great idea, but we followed the recipe to the letter and our dough was so crumbly that we couldn't form ropes small enough to make shapes. I will look for a different ornament cookie recipe for next year. They also thought the cookies tasted good even though they were bulky and strange. I gave this two forks because, despite the problems, the kids had a great time and the end result was OK. I ended up making all the ropes and let the kids shape them and fill with the candies. I liked the concept and thought it would be a fun thing to do with the kids, but as others have commented the dough was extremely crumbly and difficult to work. I wish I had read the other reviews before I started this. The mint and ginger bread made for a yummy combination of flavored, will make every year!
A few more minutes and you can trim any excess candy, but don't wait to long or it will be too hard to trim. After one minute cooling you can slide a ribbon through the candy without touching to have something to hang it by. Takes about 8 minutes and if any bubbling starts to occur, pull them out. I smashed peppermint candy canes between a dish towel and put very fine layers of candy making sure not layered higher than the dough. I used cookie cutters to do two hearts, but also other cookie cutters and used a knife to hollow out insides. I used flour to make it less tacky when rolling it out. These were so much fun! I only refrigerated dough for one hour. i also used 1 extra tablespoon of butter and they came out perfect. though they can be hard to take off tinfoil. Amazing! taste ok but make up for it in looks.