Spooky Cookies

I am having SO MUCH FUN.

I love Hallowe’en. Everyone should love Hallowe’en. It’s spooky and fun and has some of the BEST songs. If you’ve never listened to Werewolf Bar Mitzvah then stop what you’re doing and watch it on Youtube. You won’t be sorry. I’ll wait.

Right, back to the matter in hand. Delicious biscuits! I tried a new recipe for the “sugar cookie” biscuit base upon which my pumpkins rest. And I re-used the best gingerbread recipe in the world and repurposed them for the season – as scary skeletons! The cookies are lovely and soft which is how I like them, but feel free to cook for slightly longer and roll out slightly thinner if you prefer a thinner biscuit. Also, feel free to make the skeletons with the plain biscuit recipe below, I just had a hankering for gingerbread too (greedy)!

I’m gonna hold my hands up. I’m not the best decorator. I get impatient and I’m not a good at drawing and really I’d rather just have the foodstuff in my mouth. But I tried really hard. I asked my honest-to-a-fault boyfriend if they looked like a 4 year old made them and he said, “no, they’re way better than that. ..Like a 12 year old maybe.”

FRIGHTENING!

Anyway. This is the most fun I’ve had in the kitchen in ages. I’ve eaten 4 cookies and I feel sick and accomplished. Come, join me.

Makes about 16 round cookies

Ingredients for the pumpkin biscuits

• 175g butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 275g plain flour
• 25g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt

Ingredients for the outline icing (enough to ice all the skeletons and all the pumpkin ones)

• 200g icing sugar
• 1 egg white
• Food colouring – black, green and orange

Ingredients for the flooding icing

• 100g icing sugar
• 2 tsp milk
• 1 tsp golden syrup
• Orange food colouring

Method

Cream the butter and the sugar with a handheld mixer for a few minutes until soft and fluffy. Add in the egg and vanilla sugar and beat for a minute more until soft and incorporated.

Mix together the flour, almonds, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl. Add half of the flour mixture to the butter mixture and beat again for a minute. Add the rest and mix by hand.

Divide the dough into two. Roll out one on a floured sheet of greaseproof paper and then place on a baking tray.

Do the same with the second batch of dough and then place this on top of the first (separated by the layer of greaseproof.

Refrigerate for at least 1 hour, and up to overnight (cover if chilling overnight).

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees at the end of the chilling time.

Remove the dough from the fridge, cut out into circle shapes, or whatever you fancy. I don’t have pumpkin cutters, because that feels really niche (says the person with 2 types of whale cutter), but I think my circles did the job.

Bake in the oven for 8-11 minutes. Remove when just starting to turn golden and allow to cool on a wire rack before icing.

To make the “outline” icing, just whip together the egg white and icing sugar with a handheld whisk for 3-4 minutes, until soft peaks form.

At this point I divided it into 4 batches, ½ I kept white, and I divided the rest evenly into black, orange and green.

Now, the fun begins!!

For the skeletons, follow the recipe in the link above. To decorate, you will want to pipe on a skull and bones, as below. I feel entirely ludicrous doing a “tutorial” but here we are.

Begin with the face. Draw a lightbulb shape for the outline, draw a line to section the top from bottom, and draw a triangle for the nose

Draw 2 circles for eyes

Fill in the face with the icing and draw a grid for teeth. Then get your ribcage and pelvis on the go

Limbs and digits! Done

For the pumpkins, see below:

Draw a pumpkin outline, for some of them I drew separate segments, and for some just the outline. They get better the more stuff you add, promise.

I also decided to use up some of the excess icing and make some spooooky spiderwebs.

Now, once the pumpkin outlines are dry, you can fill, or "flood" the main part of the cookies. Make the icing by mixing together the ingredients, adding colouring until you get the desired shade for your pumpkin. Mine was a bit peachy, but I went with it.

To flood, gently spoon some icing onto the cookie centre and slowly work it to the edges with a spoon. You can also pipe it on, but I was feeling lazy.

Once that layer is dry (about 90 minutes) you can add the final touches, like spooky faces, or dangling spiders. I had entirely too much fun with this,