Halloween is near! We have to be prepared, so I’m going to post some Halloween themed recipes if you host a party or if you celebrate with your family. This first recipe is quite long to do, but you’ll have some amazing pleasures! Hard works is the best expression to describe them! Neverthless, when you get the hang of drawing and piping it can be funny!
HALLOWEEN COOKIES
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 1/2 caster sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 egg
- 100 g chocolate chips
In a mixing bowl, put butter and caster sugar and mix it until you have a soft paste. Then add the egg, vanilla, baking soda and chocolate chips. Add the flour in one cup portions. When it’s all well mixed, put the dough on a floured surface. Knead the dough until it’s solid. Cover it and refrigerate for 1-2 hours for intricate shapes, if they’re normal circle shapes it’s not important.
If you didn’t refrigerate it, you can directly work it in the floured surface. Roll the dough with a 1 cm thickness. Before you cut them, prepare a tin with parchment paper. Cut the dough with halloween cookie cutters, or if you don’t have it and you don’t want to spend money, you can simply draw it and cut them with the knife. Put the cookies into the tin, leaving 2 cm between them.Bake it at 180 °C for about 8-10 minutes.
For Royal Icing:
- 910 g powdered sugar
- 55 g powdered meringue
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 170ml water
Measure the water and add the vanilla essence and mix well. Then pour all the sugar in the bowl of your standing mixer and add the meringue powder and mix with a spoon.
We stick to the flat beater and add the water gradually, then start stirring until it reaches the consistency of honey. You may need more or less water, so please do take the water content as an indication.
When the consistency is similar to the one of honey, we increase the speed and let it become more compact and smooth. At this point we divide in as many bowls as the many colours you will need for your cookies with food colouring of your choice.
I will present to you now, a cookie at a time, those we have made and please, to be clear, it is our first time, so they are not perfect. But we had a lot of fun to colour and fill each cookie, a bit less while waiting for it to dry out… Still, It is really worth it!
Let’s start with the Ghosts, the most simple! Pour the royal icing into a pastry bag with a small nozzle opening and create the edges, then fill, eliminating voids and air bubbles with the help of a toothpick. With a second pastry bag containing the black royal icing, create the mouth and eyes, then leave to dry overnight.
Following the same process, you can do the cats and the skulls.
Pumpkins are, the most difficult and time-consuming ones, but also the most beautiful in my opinion: prepare the orange, green and black royal icing in three pastry bag with small nozzles, and, using a marker to draw on food, mark the lines of a pumpkin on each one of the cookies. We begin by filling out the segments, alternately. We leave it to dry, then fill the other segments left and we spread the royal icing with the help of a toothpick and leave to dry overnight. Then add the eyes, mouth and stem the next day, remembering to allow it to dry overnight again.
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