Stained Glass Christmas Cookies

The holiday season is the perfect time to spend an afternoon baking.

Today we will learn how to make these perfect stained glass snowflake Christmas Cookies.

How To Make Stained Glass Christmas Cookies

Start with a large mixing bowl and add a cup or 2 sticks of room temperature butter.

This recipe makes between 20 and 30 cookies depending on the size of your cookie cutters so if you would like to make less the recipe is easily halved.

To the butter add a cup of granulated sugar and cream together until light and pale. You can do this by hand with some elbow grease, it should only take a few minutes or a hand mixer or stand mixer works well.

Make sure to subscribe to my channel for new Christmas recipes each week. This is a basic sugar cookie recipe so if you would like to use it to make any other type of cookies it’s a good go-to.

Next, add about half a teaspoon of vanilla for flavour and crack in one good quality free-range egg.

Use a wooden spoon or your mixer to beat the ingredients together until everything is well combined. Set the wet ingredients to the side while we measure out the dry.

In a clean bowl sieve together the dry ingredients, the all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt.

You’ll need three cups of flour for this recipe as it makes quite a thick dough that you can roll out compared to something like chocolate chip cookies. To the flour add the baking powder, half a teaspoon, and the salt to round out all the flavours.

You’ll only need a small amount of baking powder so the cookies keep their shape and don’t rise too much, just enough so they don’t have too hard of a texture.

Sieve the ingredients into the bowl by tapping it with your hand, if you don’t have a sieve you can easily skip this step and just use a whisk to remove any lumps in the flour.

Once you have sieved the dry ingredients it can now be combined with the wet. I like to do this in thirds or two parts, mix well in between each addition before adding the next.

You may need to switch and mix the dough with your hands towards the end if it gets to stiff for the mixer or wooden spoon.

Divide the cookie dough in two and wrap it in plastic wrap or greaseproof paper and place into the fridge for at least a few hours to rest and firm up. At this stage, you can also freeze the dough for later use or leave it in the fridge for up to three days for when you have a spare moment to bake the cookies.

When you are ready to bake the cookies remove the dough from the fridge and let it warm up for about 5 minutes before starting to roll it out.

It shouldn’t be sticky, you can sprinkle the rolling pin with icing sugar or powdered sugar if you do have any issues. Roll the dough out to about 1 cm thick or a third of an inch.

If your dough gets the too soft place it into the fridge for 10 minutes or so to firm up.

Use your cookie cutters to cut as many snowflakes out of the dough as possible, then roll out the leftover and repeat until you have used all of the cookie dough.

These cookies have stained glass in the centre so you’ll also need to use a much smaller cookie cutter to cut out the centre of each cookie. If you want to place these on the baking sheet too and bake them, they’re so delicious.

Place the cookies on a baking sheet lined with baking paper so there is no chance of them sticking.

Now for the stained glass centres, which is pretty simple. You’ll need some hard candies in whichever colours you would like to use, I’ve gone for Christmas green and red.

Lollypops also work great. Use a mortar and pestle or a rolling pin and a plastic bag to crush the candies up into smaller pieces.

Use a small spoon and tip some of the candies into the centre of each snowflake. Make sure they stay in the centre, you’ll need about 1 or 2 teaspoons worth per cookie.

Place the cookies into a 180C | 350F oven for 6-8 minutes or until the edges of the cookies just start to brown.

Remove them from the oven and leave to cool completely on the baking sheet.

The centres will have melted creating perfect stained glass. Be careful with them until they have hardened.

I’m using a piping bag and some basic icing, 1 cup of icing sugar and 1-2 teaspoons of milk, to create a few patterns on the snowflake.

Dust with a small amount of icing sugar for the snowy effect and the cookies are ready to serve.

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