Candy Cane Sugar Cookies

Today is the day Matthew and I are taking down our holiday decorations. I mentioned to a friend over Instagram that I'm equal parts happy and sad about this; sad because the holiday season is easily one of the happiest times of the year, and happy because it means new beginnings and candy cane sugar cookies! We always end up with tons of candy canes because they're such an easy and fun thing to gift to family and friends. I love seeing candy canes from all of our friends and family hang on our tree during the Christmas season, but when it comes time to take everything down it makes me super sad to throw them away! It seems like such a waste. So this year I decided to make candy cane sugar cookies. It's a classic sugar cookie with a stained "glass" window made of candy cane. This was a concept I'd seen many many times on all of those holiday baking shows that always seem to be on TV from November to January and I wanted to test it out so badly- so here we are.

Ingredients:
3 sticks of room temp butter
2 cups of sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp almond extract
1 tsp salt
5-6 cups all-purpose flour
at least 3 candy canes (but up to as many as you'd like), crushed up


Method:
Combine the room temperature butter and 2 cups of sugar until well combined. I don't have a stand mixer so I used a spoon and it was my workout for the day 😉 Then add in the eggs, extracts, and salt until thoroughly combined again. Add the flour one cup at a time until you can form the dough into a large ball. If you're at 5 cups of flour and the dough is still sticking to everything and floppy, add the sixth cup. Dump your dough onto a floured counter and form into a ball. Split the ball into two- reshape into balls and cover completely with plastic wrap. Set in the refrigerator for 45 minutes- 1 hour. 

Right before you take the dough out, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. One at a time, take the cold dough balls out and set them on a floured surface. Roll the dough out about 1/4 inch thick (or slightly less in case the cookie spreads/rises). Cut your cookies out with your cookie cutter, then take a tsp and gently press the open part of the spoon into the center just to mark a circle. Use a butter knife or something similar (toothpick?) to cut out that center circle. Place the excess dough back in the refrigerator between rounds. Set the cookies with their "windows"  on a baking sheet that has parchment paper on it. Set some crushed candy cane in the window of the cookies. Bake for 10-13 minutes- watch for the edges to get golden and the candy to completely melt and they're done. Let the cookies set on the cookie sheet long enough for the candy to harden again or carefully slide the entire piece of parchment with the cookies on it to a cooling rack to let them set. When you've worked your way through the entire batch of dough or run out of candy canes, you're done! Remember, different brands of candy canes will melt at different speeds so you kind of have to keep an eye on your cookies until you know for sure the proper cooking time.


Quick note: I used non-traditionally flavored and colored candy canes. For this reason I only used vanilla and almond extract in my cookies- those flavors work well with "piña colada" and "jelly bean" which were the flavors of my candy canes. If I had been using traditional candy canes, I would have also added peppermint extract to the cookie dough!

Thank you for reading!

  





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