Stained Glass Cookies

This was a fun recipe. And by fun, I do mean that it looked great on paper but made me want to fork my own eyes out in actuality.

Cut outs and I? We are not friends. Never have been, never will be. I don't even like the taste of cutouts. But these were just so pretty!

Ingredients were pretty simple. Jolly ranchers and cutout dough (in my case, homemade--unsalted butter, flour, one yolk, sugar, and vanilla).

According to the recipe, the prep time for this was 15 minutes. If someone can make all of this in 15 minutes, I'd be calling the world records group.

Step 1: Make dough, if doing so. Shape into 3 discs. Refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours. Then roll out.


Step 2: Using a large size and small size of the same (or different, I suppose, if you want) cutout, do cutouts from your dough (first with the big one, and then cut out the middle of the big cutout with the little cutout) and put them on a piece of parchment paper just big enough for a cookie sheet.

Step 3: Separate colors of jolly ranchers. The recipe says "red and green only." I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I've seen color specific packs of jolly ranchers, so I did all five colors in one original flavor bag and had wayyy more than enough.

Anyway. The next thing the recipe says to do is put the jolly ranchers in a food processor. I'm pretty anti-breakingthebladesonmyfoodprocessor/cleaningmyfoodprocessorbecauseihadtochopupjollyranchers so I put each color in a separate lunch bag, went out to the garage, and hit them with a hammer until finely chopped.

Here, I learned something: jolly ranchers stick together, even when finely chopped/hammered, even when only left for 10 minutes. I suggest doing one color at a time, because it become a royal pain to rehammer everything.



Step 4: Pour crushed ranchers into individual bowls or saucers or whatever you want. Then, using a tiny spoon (or a metal baby spoon, which worked great for me), spoon some into the middle cuts on your cutouts. The recipe says "level with the cutout"...I say "higher than the cutout" because level left a few holes.


Step 5: Bake. Recipe says 8-10 minutes "or until golden brown". If I cooked them for 8 minutes, they would have been black. 4 minutes and 30 seconds was just about perfect for me. It also says to let them cool on the cookie sheet, but I took them off (ON the parchment paper) and set them aside so they wouldn't continue to cook.

The recipe, supposedly, makes 36 cookies. I made probably a good 50, maybe more. Most of them were in my first few attempts at this and were burnt, broken, ugly, and thrown away. But hey...some of them turned out awesomely so it was worth it!


...and I'll never be making them again.