If you want your dough to have a visible texture that shows up when you break the cookies apart, or when you have undecorated cookies, add texture to the polymer clay before you bake it. It is best to add textures which are inert, rather than textures based on seeds or other foods which may attract insects to your finished miniatures. For the cookies in these instructions I used fine untinted sand, available for 'sand art' in the children's section of a craft shop. Other inert materials (gritty bits of chalk) would work as well.
To roll out the dough to a uniform thickness, set it on your working/baking tile or a piece of tinfoil, between two narrow lengths of wood or plastic. I used coffee stir sticks. Now run your clay roller over the clay pressing down on it to roll it to a uniform thickness by pressing the clay down until the roller runs smoothly on the plastic or wood rails.
The photo above shows clay which is untextured rolled to thickness and clay which has sand added for texture. You can adjust the amount of sand you add to achieve the texture you want.
For some cookies, ones which have texture due to added fruit, nuts or chocolate, you can bake small amounts of the correct colors of polymer clay and chop them to add them into unbaked dough. That method will be shown in a later step where it is used to make chocolate chip cookies.
