Ornaments you can eat: A recipe for stained glass cookies

Shree Paradkar is a columnist in this paper, but outside of it, she's a suburban mommy who views minor hockey season as an interruption to baking for Sunday brunch.

TODAY'S RECIPE

A Martha Stewart recipe for Stained Glass Cookies we published in 2008. "These sugar cookies, if pierced before cooking, could double as edible Christmas tree ornaments."

THE COOKIES 

The recipe calls for "finely chopped" hard candy. My niece and co-baker Anika, who is visiting from Australia, colour-sorted a bag of Jolly Ranchers and ran them for a few seconds in our quad blade Ninja mixer.

Making the sugar cookie itself is deliciously simple. We didn't have a tree-shaped cookie cutter, so we improvised. Cut out the dough, placed the cut-outs on cookie sheets, started sprinkling candy in each. And then thought: what if the candy sticks to the non-stick pan? We hurriedly slipped a silicone baking sheet underneath the last set before adding the crushed candy.

Baked for 12 minutes (recipe says 11 but they looked too soft), took the glittering beauties out of the oven, cooled them. That's when the scale of the culinary disaster hit home. The candy was stuck to the pan as tightly as a leech on a leg.

Plucking it off only meant more loss. It took concentration, like what exact angle to put precisely what amount of pressure to get them unstuck. Rescued some. With the rest, Anika suggested kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken bits with gold to make them ever more beautiful — but with buttercream. Sadly, my young teens came home from school and ate up the crumbs before we could experiment.

Both Anika and I found the cookies confusing. Do you chew or suckle? Since my kids are nothing if not frank, we asked them. My older teen, who once called a palak paneer I made "swamp meets fungus," put it in his mouth, winced and said "Good thing I don't still have my braces.". My younger one, whose childhood pronouncement of a dish I'd made was "thewe's something poisonous in thewe," delicately broke the edges off, chewed the cookie, suckled on the candy and said: "It's quite good."

I say if that’s how you eat them, you might as well bake just cookies and eat candy separately.

THE SCORE

They are best used as novelty Christmas ornaments. Just bake them longer in that case so they don't fall apart.

THE RECIPE

Stained glass cookies 

2 cups all-purpose flour + more for rolling dough

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

7 oz (about 30) clear coloured hard candies (Life Savers or Jolly Ranchers), colours separated, finely chopped

In large bowl, sift flour, salt and baking powder.

In bowl of stand mixer, blend butter and sugar on medium speed with paddle attachment until pale and fluffy, 3 minutes. Mix in egg until smooth, 1 minute. Gradually blend in flour mixture on low speed until combined. Stir in vanilla. Wrap dough in plastic; refrigerate until cold, 45 minutes.

Line 3 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Roll out dough on well-floured surface to about 1/8-inch thick. Cut out shapes with Christmas tree cookie cutter. Place 2 inches apart on sheets, lifting with metal spatula.

Use tip of paring knife to make triangular cutout in centre of each cookie. Reroll scraps and use remaining dough.

Sprinkle candy liberally in single layer in hole of each cookie. Refrigerate until dough is firm, 15 minutes.

Bake in 325F oven on upper and lower racks, until candy has melted and completely filled cutout and edges are pale gold, about 11 minutes.

Rotate pans halfway through baking time. Let cool completely on sheets.

Makes about 36 cookies.