My kids love these cookies. We make them together for a lot of  the celebratory holidays. They are delicious and sooo moreish, it really is hard to just stop at eating one of them. They are also relatively easy to make and need less than ten minutes cooking time! My kids love helping my mix up the dough and then really enjoy cutting out all the shapes in the dough, although I got to honestly say, I think the best part for them is in the eating.

TRICK OR TREAT – HALLOWEEN FOOD

Now I know that on Halloween most kids are going to probably eat more than enough sugar, but being in Australia, trick or treating is not always followed and in some cases you have to drive your kids from street to street to find the few houses celebrating the day. This year Halloween falls on a day that they have extra curricular activities on until late after school so trick or treating is out this year. But they are not too upset as they have a spooky school disco to dress up for at the end of the week. The other thing that helped smooth things over was making several batches of these cookies, with most going to school to be shared with their class mates.

HOW TO MAKE HALLOWEEN COOKIES

Theses cookies are simple and easy to make and the end cookie really is worth the wait time that you need to allow the dough to cool in the fridge – minimum 30mins in the freezer or several hours in the fridge is best.

INGREDIENTS:

FOR THE COOKIES1 cup of Sugar
150grams of unsalted butter room temperature (if you only have salted, omit the salt latter in the recipe)
2 Cups of white flour
1 Teaspoon of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons of milk

FOR THE ICING
1 bag of Icing Sugar (the pure stuff, not the icing mixture for cakes)
Water (amount varies but have a small jug on hand)
Orange and Black gel food colour (if you only have liquid food colouring, make sure you use less water)

UTENSILS YOU WILL NEED
A stand mixer with a beater attachment
Cup and Spoon measurement tools
A spatula
A fork or whisk and spoons
Spare bowls
Glad Wrap
Rolling pin
Cookie cutters – Halloween shapes work best for this project!
Baking paper or a silicone baking sheet
A baking tray or similar
An oven and a fridge

THE METHOD:

1. Preheat a fan-forced oven to 180 degrees celsius. (Adjust other ovens to best heat in regards to this temperature)
2. Mix butter and sugar until creamed in an electric stand mixer with the beater.
3. In a small bowl lightly whisk the egg, vanilla, and milk. Add to the creamed butter and sugar and mix.
4. In another bowl whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt.
5. Add half the dry ingredients into the wet and mix on low. When combined add in the last of the dry ingredients and again mix on low until a dough forms.
6. Use the spatula to help you scrape the dough out of the bowl and place it in a heap on a large piece of glad wrap. Enclose the dough in the glad wrap so no air can enter and press dough together to form a disc shape.
7. Place in the fridge for 2-4 hours. If you are scant of time place it in the freezer for a minimum of 30 minutes.
8. Lightly dust a large flat work surface such as a table (I use a sift to help me really cover the area evenly).
9. Take the dough from the fridge or freezer removing the glad wrap (I usually break the dough into two pieces at this point to make the next steps easier)
10. Knead the dough in your hands back into a disc shape.
11. Place the dough onto the flour-dusted surface – don’t worry if your dough is sticky from not being cold enough, just use plenty of flour on your work surface – and roll it out evenly into a circle shape to a height of about 1cm.
12. Use your cookie cutters to cut as many shapes as you can in the dough and place these onto a baking tray that is lined with baking paper or a silicone baking sheet. Make sure you leave ample space between each cookie incase they expand a little in the oven.
13. Repeat steps 9-11 until you have used up all your dough or there is not enough room on your baking tray.
14. Place in the oven for 8-12 minutes. Keep an eye on them, if they start to brown in any way they are ready. In reality they should come out of the oven almost exactly the same shade of creamy yellow that they went in, but as I have kids and am not always paying enough attention ours always get a little over cooked.
15. Leave to cool for at least 10minutes. They will be quite soft when they come out and will harden as they cool. I have stone benches and I like to slide the baking sheet onto the cool stone to help the cookies cool even quicker.Once cool you can ice them

TO ICE THE COOKIES

We had Halloween cookie cutters in the shapes of pumpkins, bats, and ghosts. I got mine from Coles when I was doing my weekly shop so look out for them at your local grocery store.

I split the bag of icing into three bowls and started with the orange icing first. Add in your gel food colouring and then slowly mix in a spoon of water into the icing sugar at a time, mixing until you get a paste like consistency. You do not want to add too much water as liquidy icing sugar will just run off the cookies.  Keep adding in more food colour if needed until you get the vibrancy of the colour you are after. Next do the same in seperate bowls with the black food dye and then only add water to your icing sugar to get white icing.

Remember if you only have liquid food dye then don’t add as much water. Another note – red and yellow makes orange! As for black if you don’t have black food colouring…. not sure – try to get a really dark purple using blue and red….hey just add in all the colours and see what you get LOL!

To ice you can do any of the following. Spoon the icing onto the cookies or put the icing into plastic snack bags and cut of a tiny snippet of one corner for the icing to be pumped out through, use your profession icing tools or do as we did and drop the cookies flat into the bowl of icing and use a spoon to pick up and scrape off the excess icing. We found this to be the fastest and easiest way to get this done especially as we were not after perfection. For a finishing touch I put the last of the black icing into a little plastic snack bag and cut a tiny snippet of one corner and used this to make eyes on the ghosts and some of the pumpkins.

HALLOWEEN SORTED!!!

SOOOOO yummy and so much fun to make with the kids! Hope you try these ghoulishly delicious halloween cookies and let me know how they turn out for you and if you could really stop at just one!

PS. I am trying to be dairy and wheat free at the moment and these broke me, so if you are trying to be good…. well don’t blame me if you too fall off the wagon!

Samantha.