Stain Glass Christmas Cookies & Tree Decorations!

Christmas is fast approaching, its cold outside and I keep hearing Christmas songs.  Merina my eldest daughter in this years nativity play is a snowflake! I did have high hopes for Mary but as my brother says she's keeping up the family tradition of getting rubbish parts.  I think I was a spoon one year and he was a raisin!  I'm going to bribe the school teacher next year to get Tallulah the part of Mary...

Tallulah and I made these stain glass cookies today, you can eat them straightaway or hang them on the tree as pretty home made decorations. (They didn't last long on our tree!)

Ingredients

250g Marg

140g caster sugar

1 egg yolk

2 tsp vanilla extract

300g plain flour

Crushed boiled sweets/lolly pops - a good handful

Method

Heat oven to 180c. Cream the fat and sugar until fluffy, add the egg yolk and vanilla essence mix well.

Sieve in the flour and mix until it comes into a dough you may need to get your hands into combine it. If the mixture is to wet add more flour until its forms a dough.

Roll out and cut out with cookie cutters, then cut out a smaller shape from the middle you can use a milk bottle top for the middle hole if you don't have a small cookie cutter.

Place the cookies onto a baking tray on silicone paper or grease proof paper.  If you want to hang the cookies on your tree use a straw to cut the perfect hole in your cookies. Sprinkle in 1 tsp of crushed sweets in the middle (star shaped hole on mine). Don't worry how lumpy or crushed up the sweets are they melt in the oven to create a stain glass effect.  When the cookies are cooked and cooled tie a piece of ribbon through the small straw hole to hang on your tree with.  Beautiful!