Hi everyone -- last year I made stained glass cookies with the William Sonoma cutters with some young nieces. Does anyone have a good technique for breaking up the life savers / jolly rancher candies? Or know of something better to use to fill in the openings in the cookies?
Thanks for your help / suggestions!
you can use a food processor (gets it to a nice powder) or else what I do is just stick them in a ziploc bag, put a kitchen towel on top and hit with a hammer or the back of a heavy skillet. If you're doing multiple colors for a real stained glass look, I find it works better to leave the chunks a little larger (so you can adjust where you want the colors to be) but if you're doing all one color, you can pulverise them and it doesn't matter.
Question about these cookies.......isn't the candy part hard to eat? I know how hard it is to eat Jolly Rancher's (you know, it's kinda sticky) and can't imagine a cookie like that. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I've never had a stained glass cookie before.
I tried these this past weekend and they turned out awful. The smashed jolly ranchers that I used seemed to just bake away and flow into the cookies. What tips can you give me that have been successful with these cookies? They are so beautiful and I would love to be able to make them. Pam from Bama
here is a link to what sweetopia just posted on her blog it shows how she did hers
http://www.sweetopia.net/
hope this helps
Another good way to make them is to bake the cookies a little, then add the candies toward the end. Sugar can burn if it's in the oven too long.
If I have an 8 minute bake time, I bake for 6 minutes, then add the candy, then bake the remaining 2 minutes. The cookie part is the same as usual and the candy has enough time to melt without burning. 
For anyone reading this thread and has never made these cookies before.....
1) let them cool completely before trying to pick them up. Yeah, I *DID* find this one out the hard way! The candy needs to cool so it can re-harden, otherwise it's a gooey mess, and pulls away from the cookie. Which is why you need to ......
2) Bake them on parchment or on a sheet of alum foil for easier removal. You can pick up the whole sheet of parchment or foil and set it on a cooling rack so you can reuse the pan for the next batch.
I know you can't use candy sugar as in the large 'sprinkles', they didn't melt when I tried them last year. I used crushed peppermint candies for a white/pink look. If you scrap book or make embossed cards you can use the heat gun to melt the candy in the opening after baking the cookies. That's what I did when the candy sugar stuff didn't melt, but had a bunch of cooked snowflake cookies with empty cutouts.
Quote by @%username% on %date%
%body%
