How to Shape Red Ropes in Dough for Candy Cane Cookies

"Hi, I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to make these peppermenty candy cane cookies. Our dough has now been in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes. So it's nice and cool and easy to handle. Our red is still a nice brilliant red and then we've got our uncolored portion and we're going to now form ropes out of the dough so that it's the first step for becoming candy canes. First we're going to take some of the red dough, we want about a teaspoon, maybe a little bit less and we're going to form it into a rope. Now you can see on my surface that I have some wax paper taped down and this will help protect the counter top. If you have a pastry board then that's great to use also. You don't want to use your hands too much because then the dough is going to get too soft, you just want to work it a little bit and you want about a four inch piece. So here is four inches, you want to get a little bit shorter than this. It's very helpful whenever you're working with precise shapes that you have either a ruler or some other form of measurement. Because in something like this you really want to make sure that you get everything to be the right size. So that's about four inches and we're going to put that off to the side and we're going to start on the next one."