Chicken....spicy and sweet?

For Christmas some dear friends of ours gave us some garden goodies. Among them? Dried hot peppers....I have been excited to try them for ages! I decided this weekend would be a good time to do so. Using the sweet and spicy DIPPING sauce recipe she recommended I decided to whip up the sauce and throw it in the crock pot with the chicken. The sauce on its own? AMAZING. The sad thing....after sitting in the crock pot for a few houris the sugar seemed to cook into the chicken making it pretty sweet :-( (or something?). I will totally be making it again without the crock pot...and from here on out browning any meat going into the crock pot....that is one step I always leave out...