That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles...

It's the holiday season!  Which means it's time for lots of baking and COOKIES!  Combine that with eggnog, and what could be better?

I have several great cookie recipes that I usually use for cookie exchanges, but I wanted to try something new this year.  So I turned to my best buddy Pinterest to see what caught my eye.  

Well, lookie lookie!  Stained glass cookies!  Made by dropping crushed up hard candies into the centers of sugar cookies, which then melt as they bake.  I could do that!  Let's see, which shapes and colors do I want to use...

Looking good!

Wow, so pretty!

OK, now they're just showing off...

"Yeah, I could make those!" I thought to myself.  "They would impress the socks off my Mom's Group when I bring them for our cookie exchange!"

But I forgot the one big rule of baking - don't make something new for a cookie exchange without trying it out on your family ahead of time.

So here they are, all set to go into the oven and become beautiful stained glass cookies!

Though I followed the directions exactly, removing these cookies was not a success...

So I thought, "Maybe I need to try a different shape?  Perhaps those pointy stars are doomed to snap apart?"

Nope.  It's not the shape that's the problem!

Not willing to toss out a perfectly good dough AND all of my backbreaking work crushing those hard candies, I thought I'd try sprinkling the candies on top of the cookies before baking.

 Great, now it looks like a murder scene on my cookie sheet.  Both alien and human lives were lost...

Because I am stubborn brilliant, I finally just mixed the crushed hard candies straight into the dough and cut cookies out of that.  You can see the little bits of candy sprinkled throughout the cookies below...  They were "ok", but not spectacular.  

Of course, everything looks (and tastes!) better with frosting!  So a generous helping of cookie icing from the grocery store helped to finish these cookies off and kept them from being a complete embarrassment at my cookie exchange.  

But what a far cry these were from the stained glass cookies they were supposed to be!

Needless to say, I will not be making these particular cookies when my in-laws visit in a few weeks.  But I don't want to give up on them completely because I still think they're beautiful!  I just need to figure out what to do differently.  Which brings me to...

I followed the directions in the stained glass cookie recipe here perfectly, but they just didn't hold up.  Those candy centers kept sticking straight to the pan, though it was very generously greased each time.  Do you bakers out there have any suggestions?

So I'll be using a more tried-and-true cookie recipe for my in-laws' upcoming visit... these holiday CookieKins with their faces on the edible icing transfers!  (Click HERE for my previous blog with CookieKins how-to directions).  Ah yes, my never-fail sugar cookies with royal icing and a CookieKins edible transfer on top are guaranteed to please.

Oh my, these are almost too cute to eat!  ALMOST...

Grandaddy and Grams IRL (In Real Life)

And really, how can I go possibly wrong with pre-made sugar cookie dough?  

Oh dear, I just had to ask...