Clear, hard candy has what food scientists call a “glass structure.” When hard candy is made, corn syrup - made of sugars called glucose and fructose is added to melted table sugar (sucrose) to keep the sugar molecules from getting organized into crystals.
Stained Glass Cookies are made from cut out sugar cookies and hard candy. You can use our Stained Glass Cookie Cutter from our collection to make these type of cookies. Our cutters already attached with cut out “windows”, you just need to filled with crush hard candies in these windows to make pretty sugar designs in our cookies.
You need to separate the candies by color, then put them in a resealable bag and crush them with the flat end of a meat mallet, or a rolling pin. The candy should not be ground into a super fine powder, otherwise it might get over caramelized in the oven. You also don’t want huge chunks of candy, think coarse sand or small pebbles. You only need to fill the centers of the cookies about 2/3 of the way full with the candy, otherwise you run the risk of it overflowing onto the cookie.
Place the cookies on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. This is super important, as otherwise the hard candy “glass” will stick to the baking sheet. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes first and then pour the crushed candy into the windows. These trick will make candy perfectly melted without over boiled them, and put back the half bake cookies with crushed candy in the oven for 5-10 minutes more until the cookies are done.
Let the baked cookies cool for at least 5 minutes on the baking sheet while the candy hardens again. Once it does, voila! Stained Glass Cookies.