Make Stained Glass Heart Cookies
If you’re looking for the perfect cookie recipe to express some genuine love, these stained glass heart cookies are just the treat. Sweet, tasty, and shaped like a heart, they're sure to bring a smile on a loved one’s face.
Contents
Ingredients
- 1 cup (240 milliliters) unsalted butter, softened
- ¾ cup (180 milliliters) sugar
- 1 large egg
- 1 teaspoon (5 milliliters) vanilla extract
- ⅓ teaspoon (1.6 milliliters) salt
- 2 ½ cups (600 milliliters) flour
- 15 small hard candies (e.g., Jolly Ranchers, Life Savers, etc. )
- Makes: Approx. 30 cookies
Steps
Making the Cookie Dough
- Cream the butter and sugar in a medium-sized bowl. Blend well on high speed with an electric mixer. Mix until it’s fully creamed and fluffy.
- Add the egg and vanilla extract. Blend again to incorporate the ingredients.
- Combine the flour and salt together in a separate bowl.
- Pour the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture. Add the flour mixture one-third at a time. Stir well with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together.
- Divide the dough in half. Roll into two balls and cover with plastic wrap.
- Chill the cookie dough for about 5 hours or overnight.
Baking the Cookies
- Preheat the oven to {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}}.
- Cover a baking tray with parchment paper.
- Crush the hard candies. Place the hard candies in a Ziploc bag and close tightly. Slam the bag repeatedly against your counter until the candies are broken into mostly small pieces. Set aside for later use.
- A mallet or wooden tenderizer tool might make the process easier when trying to break up the candies.
- Roll the cookie dough out. Remove your cookie dough from the fridge. Sprinkle flour over a surface and use a rolling pin to roll out the cookie dough until it is ¼-inch thick.
- Cut out the dough into medium-sized hearts. Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter that’s medium-sized, cut out cookies from the cookie dough and transfer them to the baking sheet.
- Use a smaller cookie cutter to cut out smaller hearts in the middle of the cookies. This will create a mini heart center in each cookie, where the stained glass effect will appear. Remove the leftover cookie dough from the centers and set aside.
- Sprinkle the crushed hard candies in the middle of each cookie. Fill in the mini heart centers of each cookie with the hard candies.
- Bake the cookies for about 8-10 minutes. Bake until the edges are brown and the candies melt completely.
- Allow the cookies to cool. Remove them from the oven and have them cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes. Afterwards, use a spatula to transfer the cookies on a wire rack to finish cooling.
- Serve. Place the cookies on a serving plate. Enjoy!
Tips
- Use multiple hard candy colors to create a marbled glass effect to the cookies.
- The leftover cookie dough from the cookie cutting can be used to make normal sugar cookies or can be used for another recipe.
- For sweeter and more decorative cookies, design the cookies with frosting, icing, and/or sprinkles on top.
Warnings
- Give the cookies time to cool when they have finished baking. Removing them too quickly while they’re hot will cause the candy centers to spill out. The centers need time to harden.
Things You'll Need
- Medium-sized bowl
- Fridge
- Oven
- Electric mixer
- Wooden spoon
- Plastic wrap
- Ziploc bag
- Baking sheet
- Parchment paper
- Rolling pin
- Spoon
- Spatula
- Two heart-shaped cookie cutters (one medium-sized, one small)
- Serving plate
