Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken

My first kitchen adventure featured baked sweet and sour chicken. The recipe I used can be found here. The idea behind the recipe is fairly simple. Cut the chicken into chunks, dip it in cornstarch and egg, pan fry the chicken slightly, pour the sauce over the chicken and bake.

Well...easier said than done. I wouldn't say this recipe was extremely difficult, but it was a bit more involved than I'm used to. And I kind of feel like that amount of effort wasn't equal to the flavor and texture that resulted. But more on that at the end.
First I cut up my chicken. A word on that: kitchen scissors, everybody. They made that task SOOO much easier and faster.

Next I dipped the chicken pieces in cornstarch and egg. No pictures of that, hopefully for obvious reasons. I used the wet hand dry hand method, but still, this got messy. I made a large mess of the kitchen and dirtied probably more plates than necessary as I didn't really know what I was doing. Then I fried the coated pieces, and honestly I probably could have fried them a bit longer.

Chicken pieces went into the baking pan, I poured my sauce over them, and stuck the whole thing in the oven.

The dish bakes for an hour, but the chicken has to be turned every 15 minutes. The first few times I opened the oven, all I smelled was vinegar and it started to worry me.

This is what I ended up with. The taste was surprisingly good. However, I would not say it's as good as Chinese takeout like she does. I really wanted that crispiness you get from Chinese restaurants and didn't get that here. The coating seemed to fall off and just sit in the sauce on a lot of pieces. And I found the sauce to be almost too sweet, which surprised me. For all the work, I don't think the end result was worth it.
Husband gave it 4 stars. I give it 3.