The beginning of February marks the beginning of Valentine season. Pink, heart-shaped decorations are now present wherever you look. Whether you plan to celebrate the holiday or not, you can treat yourself – or your loved ones – with some scrumptious goodies! Preferably some that appeal not just to your stomach, but also your eyes. 🙂

I’ve been meaning to bake some of those stained glass cookies for ages. Originally, I wanted to make them in a winter-themed version for Christmas. Having baked hundreds of other festive cookies I had to decide against that idea though and moved it to Valentine’s Day.

For about 3 dozens of small cookies you’ll need:

• 2.5 cups flour
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 80g butter
• 35g coconut oil (can be replaced with 35g butter)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• a pinch of salt
• a pinch of ground anise
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon milk

Also:

• a handful of pink hard sugar sweets
• cookie cutters – ideally, two of the same (heart) shape but different sizes (to cut the windows in cookies). If you only have one cookie cutter, you’ll have to cut the windows using a spoon or a knife.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Beat the butter with coconut oil with an electric mixer. Add the rest of ingredients, mix until well combined. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Smash the sweets. Warning: it’s a messy process. I put my sweets in two layers of plastic bags, covered them with a tea towel and then battered with a hammer – some pieces still managed to get out and spread around the kitchen.

Overall, the smaller the pieces, the better. Due to the mess the sweets had made in my kitchen despite the precautions, I left a lot of larger bits – luckily, they melted without any problems.

Roll out the dough, cut out your cookies with holes inside (using a smaller cookie cutter in the middle or manually scooping some of the dough out). Move the cookies to a lined baking tray. Fill each hole with crushed sweets.

Bake the cookies until the sweets are melted – in my case it took about 7 minutes. The time may vary depending on your oven – observe the sweets and once you see them start to boil (bubbles appearing on melted sweets) – immediately take them out of the oven.

If you leave the cookies in the oven for too long, sugar in the melted sweets will caramelise and turn dark brown.

After taking the tray out of the oven, leave the cookies on the tray until the sweets have completely hardened. Don’t move them too early, or the melted sweets will stay on the tray and you’ll be left with a cookie with an empty hole. 🙂

• Sweet