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If your kids got hard candy for Halloween (does anyone give out hard candy anymore?  They might, I guess...) you can make fabulous stained glass window cookies with them!

My mother showed us how to do this when I was young.  It's a lot of fun!

Take any firm cookie dough, like sugar cookies or gingerbread and make a frame, either by rolling the dough into snakes and making "leading" designs to fill with candy or more simply, by using a large and a small cookie cutter to make shapes with cutouts.

Place the cookies on a foil-lined baking sheet (the foil is critical!  Without it you won't be able to remove your pieces from the pan!) and fill the openings with crushed hard candy.  This is the fun part!

Experiment with different kinds of candy- butterscotch candies make great warmly lit windows for house shapes and swirled peppermints make beautiful striped patterns.

My favorite are the transparent clear candies that you can actually see light through.  You can mix and match the candies and even use multiple colors in one cutout for a watercolor effect.  Don't forget to poke a hole with a straw before baking if you plan to hang your cookies or use them as package tie-ons.

Bake the cookies as you normally would but allow them to cool completely before trying to remove from the pan.  Lift the entire cookie and the foil around it, then carefully pull the foil away.  Voila'!

It will look like you spent hours making them but it really doesn't take long at all.