Stained glass Xmas cookies

Stained glass cookies to decorate your Christmas windows!  Pretty and Yummy! Last week, my friend Catherine and her daughters, Ariana and Erin joined us for a rather chaotic morning of cookie baking.  With Catherine also taking theses beautiful photos.  

Cath's mom made stained glass windows with her when she was a kid, and we had to pass on the tradition, and introduce it to my family!

Cath bashed up a whole lot of sparkle sweets with a rolling pin, which were colour coded and placed into sturdy plastic bags.

And I made cookie dough.  My favourite basic vanilla sugar cookie dough.

Ingredients:

185g unsalted butter
1 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 ½ cups plain flour
a pinch of salt
1 egg

Cream together the sugar, butter and vanilla until light and fluffy.

Sift in the flour and salt and beat in egg.  Process until a smooth dough forms

Wrap in clingwrap and refridgerate for about 10 min.

Roll cookie dough out to about 3mm in thickness.  use a larger cookie cutter to make outline shape, and a smaller cookie cutter to make the hole for the stained glass effect.  Dot a hole into the top of the cookie to loop ribbon through later.

Line your baking tray with tinfoil, and gently place your cookie shape on the tray.  Bake at 180˚C for 9 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle the shattered sparkles in the gap for the stained glass effect.  You can mix colours or do solid colours.  Slide cookies back into the oven for about 4-5 minutes, or until sweets are melted.  Romove from oven, and let cool on the trays.

Romove, string and hang!

Merry Christmas everybody, and hope the holidays are filled with hugs, giggles, good food, inspiring novels, late mornings, loved ones, cookies in bed sunsets and maybe the odd sunrise...

* cookie recipe from Donna Hay.