Its Christmas time! Ho-ho-ho!

This year has been dreadful for all - constant fear of pandemic, hectic work-from-home jobs or unfortunate loss of jobs, worried loved ones, missing the old carefree lifestyle and so on...

But we humans have another gift - HOPE, which gives strength to strive on. As we are nearing the end of the year, its jolly old Christmas time and as the quote goes from one of my favorite childhood movies "Home Alone" - "This is Christmas. The season of perpetual hope..."

So on this note, we decided to experiment a little bit with classic fruit flavoured sugar candies **Sugar rush mode on**. We had been toying with the idea of making stained glass cookies for quite some time and finally we tried it out. And well...it turned out pretty cool!

Here goes the easy-peasy recipe:

Ingredients:

• White Butter - 30gm

• Sugar - 22gm

• Honey - 4gm

• Vanilla essence - 1/4 tsp

• All-purpose flour(maida) - 54gm

• Cornflour - 1/2 TBSP

• Baking powder - 1/4tsp

• Baking soda - 1/4 tsp

• Milk - 6-7ml

• Fruit flavoured sugar candies - 2-3

Process steps:

• Take white butter and sugar and beat it to form a light mix (do not over cream the mix)

• Add honey and vanilla essence and mix them together

• Take a separate bowl and put all dry ingredients - maida, cornflour, baking powder, baking soda

• Sieve the dry ingredients mix and add to the butter-sugar mix

• Add a little milk to bring together the dough (do not over knead the mixture, all the ingredients need to be mixed enough to bring them all together)

• Keep the dough in refrigerator for cooling and setting for at least 1 hr

• Take out the dough and flatten it with rolling pin

• Use bigger size star-shaped or heart shape or any shape cookie cutter to make cookie cutouts

• Then use the smaller shaped cookie cutter to make a hole in the centre

• Take the fruit flavoured sugar candies ( I chose strawberry flavour for its red color, you can choose any) and crush them into smaller chunks

• Put these broken candy chunks inside the hole created in the centre of cookie

• Put the cookies inside pre-heated oven and bake them at 180deg for 15mins

• The candy chunks would have melted to look like stained glass sheet in the centre of the cookie

• Cool down the cookies for at least 20-25mins

• You can make a hole at the top and pass through a thread to make it Christmas tree decoration

Your stained glass cookies are ready to serve - Yay!

You can try different fruit flavour candies to add more color. These cookies are super easy to make and an absolute delight for kids - Go try it out yourself this festive season!