Difficulty Rating -

These Christmas treats are brilliant festive fun. They look really cool hanging from the Christmas tree with the fairy lights shinning through them, and they taste great too! They are great fun to make, and make the kitchen smell like a sweet factory - Yummy.

What you will need...

1 packet of frozen pastry. Allow to fully defrost, see the back of the packet for instructions.
1 Bag of clear coloured boiled sweets.
Cardboard

What to do...

First, whilst the pastry is defrosting you can be designing and making stencils. You could try a star, a Christmas stocking, a Christmas tree, a bell, a sprig of holly, anything festive and with a Christmas theme is great. The stencils need to be simple and they need to have hole inside them. If there is too much detail they might break whilst you are making them. Make sure as well that your stencil is an appropriate size to hang on your Christmas tree. Once you have cut out your Christmas stencil leave it on one side until later.

Set the oven to 180 oC/350 oF/Gas Mark 4

Line a backing sheet with greaseproof paper

Lightly dust the surface with flour to prevent the pastry sticking and roll out the pastry thinly with a rolling pin. Lie your stencil on the top of the pastry and carefully cut round it with a knife. The knife doesn't have to be very sharp, pastry isn't hard to cut.

On the top of each shape you need to make a small hole to thread some ribbon through later so that you can hang the treat on the Christmas tree. Use the handle of a teaspoon to just push into the pastry to make a small hole.

Place your cut out shapes on the paper lined baking tray, so that they don't touch.

Roll your pastry trimmings up into a ball and re-roll the pastry. Cut out as many Christmas shapes as you can, and keep re-rolling the pastry trimmings until all the pastry has been used.

Bake the Christmas shapes in the oven for 8 - 10 minutes.

In the mean time... Rinse the rolling pin because you're in for a smashing time! Place a wrapped boiled sweet onto a chopping board and tap it with the rolling pin to smash it. Once broken, unwrap the sweet and collect the broken sweet pieces on saucers, keeping all the colours separated. All the sweets need to be broken up.

Keep an eye on the time.

Take the pastry shapes out of the oven. Add different coloured crumbs of sweets to each hole in the pastry shapes. Colours in the same hole will merge. Experiment and see what designs you can make. Do be careful because the baking tray and the pastry will be hot.

Put the treats back in the oven for 2 minutes to let the sweets melt.

Take the treats out of the oven and leave to cool. Peel the treats off the paper and serve or thread ribbon or string through and hang them from your Christmas tree.