Halloween Sugar Cookies
Halloween and the October half -term always fall together. In our house that means lots of cookies, cupcakes, and more toffee apples than I care to admit to. Cooking is a go to when boredom starts creeping in - good quality family time, with delicious end results. Super Win/Win.
Easy baking is always a brilliant way to occupy little hands and imaginations for half an hour or so. The easiest recipes are the ones where you just throw everything into a bowl and mix. This blog recipe is one of these. These delicious cookies can be topped with icing or frosting, but the simplest, and the favourite topping in our house is just lots and LOTS of sugar. We made traditional pumpkins, but you can go to town on the colours and shapes. Have fun making these delicious cookies!
Renée x
Halloween Sugar Cookies
(makes 10 medium sized cookies)
Prep time with dough chilling: 1 hr 45min / Prep time without chilling: 15 mins
Baking time: 25 mins
Ingredients
150g salted butter
75g caster sugar
250g plain flour
1 large egg yolk
2 tbsp vanilla essence
Sugar Topping
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar (1 cup for orange, 1/2 cup for green)
Orange food colouring (we mixed our orange - 3 parts yellow to 1 part red)
Green food colouring
Method
1)Put all of the ingredients, except vanilla essence into your mixer bowl and mix until the ingredients come together (about 2 minutes).
2)Add vanilla essence and mix for a further 10 seconds. Just long enough to incorporate the vanilla into the mix properly.
3) Empty the dough onto your workspace and bring it together so it forms a ball.
4) Wrap the ball of dough in cling film and refrigerate for an hour.
Chilling the dough at this point makes your dough easier to work with
5) While the dough is chilling, colour your sugar
6) Place orange (or red and yellow) food colouring into the larger amount of sugar.
We used toothpicks to add the colour. A little goes a long way with gel colours
7) Keep mixing the sugar until your sugar crystals are a uniform orange colour.
8) Repeat the process with the smaller amount of sugar and your green food colour.
9) Cut two sheets of baking paper to the size of your baking tray.
10) Place your chilled dough between the sheets of baking paper and flatten with a rolling pin until the dough is about 1/4 of an inch thin.
11) Lift the baking paper onto your baking tray, take the top sheet off, and cut your cookie shapes.
12) Remove the excess dough. You can also adjust your cookies (if chilled) so that they are evenly spaced on the paper.
(You can repeat steps 9-12 for the excess dough, or save it for another day. To store: squeeze the left over dough into a ball , wrap in cling film, place the cling film in a zippy freezer bag, and freeze for up to a month.)
13) Place teaspoon amounts of the orange coloured sugar in the centre of the cookies and spread the sugar around the cookie to cover the pumpkin shape, leaving the “stalks” empty.
15)Place the green sugar on the stalks.
16) Place cookie tray in the fridge/freezer for half an hour (this chill helps the cookies retain their shape during baking).
Set your oven to 180 C, and let it warm up for 10 minutes before baking cookies.
17) Remove cookies from refrigerator when the oven is warm, place chilled cookies in oven and bake cookies for 25 minutes.
