What you'll need:
What you'll do:
Preheat oven to a low temperature - around 375 F.
Separate the candies by color, bag separately, and smash until the candy is roughly the same texture as shattered safety glass.
Cover baking sheet, and arrange the shattered candy into a mosaic pattern of your devising. Make small panes to paste with sugar icing into gingerbread house windows (or make a basic gingerbread cookie recipe, cut out cookies and then panes with a sharp knife, and bake the candies right into the window). Graceness advises: if you have metal cookie cutters of varieties you can bake them that way too, already shaped out.
Bake until candy is melted, about 5-6 minutes. Let cool slightly before trimming or stamping out shapes with a greased cookie cutter. Allow to cool thoroughly before serving or storing. Store between layers of waxed paper and keep in cool place - and it will last a fairly long time!
More elaborate designs will require more finely crushed candy, and thicker layers. If you want to get very detailed or try your hand at rendering, you'll want to experiment with a) getting the oven temperature as low as possible to melt the candy without letting it run too much (around 320 F), and b) using cake frosting tips as funnels for "drawing" with the crushed candy, in a similar fashion to that used by the Buddhist monks who do Tibetan sand painting. Come to think of it, a candy mandala could be a wonderful thing make and share with friends.
Fun tea party or birthday party trick:
Crush several bags of peppermints (the swirly red and white kind) and arrange in an even layer on your Silpat. Bake at 375 until the candy is melted into a pretty pane of pink-speckled cream "glass". Let cool very slightly, until candy can be handled with buttered fingers but is still malleable. Using a greased cookie cutter, quickly stamp out candy circles and fashion into little bowls (you may wish to form them on an overturned ramekin or similar, which you will need to butter well) which can be filled with little sweets or sugared almonds after they've cooled thoroughly. Sure to astonish and delight little girls of all ages. You may wish to wrap these in a bit of pink tulle and tie with a pink ribbon as a take-home party favor if you don't want to deal with drooly peppermint coated girls hell-bent on shattering their candy bowls with gleeful abandon and grinding the resulting shards into your carpet with the heels of their pretty little party slippers.
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