Thought I'd add a quick blog today (seeing as it's Halloween) on how to whip up a batch of Halloween cookies. Doesn't take long and the kids will love them!
You could either grab a knob of cookie dough from the supermarket (if you're pressed for time) or you could make them from scratch like I did with a simple cookies recipe. Due to copyright, I will not be able to post the recipe I use here, but I did get it from a Women's Weekly kids dress up and party ideas book. Be sure it is a recipe that is not too crumbly. Shortbread recipes are not really suitable for these.
SUPPLIES:
-Cookies cutters. If you already have planned ahead a little and have some Halloween ones, great! But if not, an oval shaped or round cutter will be good enough as these could be easily made to look like little pumpkins.
-Royal Icing. Either make from scratch OR make the same discovery as I did and run down to the local supermarket and grab yourself a bag of Queen brand ready made powder royal icing -- just add water!! The most brilliant discovery since mining for gold.
-Food colouring, (according to what shapes youa re making). For pumpkins you will need red, yellow and black.
-Disposable piping bags (Multix make them available in supermarkets) or a plastic ziplock bag.
-Paper towels.
1. After baking your cookies and letting them cool, make your Royal icing according to your recipe, or (as I would do) out of your packet mix into a bowl. Take about a third of the mix out and put into a separate bowl to use for the black (if you're doing pumpkins). Add food colouring to the colour you need. If you are making pumpkins out of round cookies, add one drop red to 2-3 drops yellow for a good orange colour.Continue with these ratios till the colour is the intensity you need it.
2. Once your colour is mixed, try to make sure the mix is not too runny to start with. If it is too runny, add a little more powder or icing sugar. Place the icing in your piping bag or inside your ziplock bag. Cover any remaining icing in your bowl with a few paper towels that have been wet and wrung out a little, by placing it over the edge of your bowl making sure not to leave any gaps. This will stop what's left from getting hard. We're going to come back to this later.
Snip a tiny bit of the corner so that when you squeeze the bag you get a string of icing come out.
3. Start by tracing the outside edge of your cookie with the icing from the bag, gently squeezing as you go around. Then set aside and move onto the next cookie. This will create a sort of a dam wall that will begin to set hard by the time you've been around all of them and come back to the first one, which will allow to you fill in the centre and keep the edge neat.
4. Once you've done them all and the icing is hard or at least semi-hard, empty the contents of your piping bag back into the bowl you mixed it in. Give it a stir and then stir in a little more water to make it a bit runnier than what you iced the edge with.
5. Take a teaspoon and drop tiny blobs of icing inside the cookie and spread around a little with the back of the spoon until there is no more cookie surface to see. If the icing is the right consistancy, the surface of the icing should go fairly smooth by itself. Set aside and go to the next one. Work as quickly as you can to avoid your icing from starting to go hard in the bowl.
6. For your pumkin faces, colour the icing you set aside black and make to the same consistancy as the icing used for the cookie edges. Put this icing in a separate bag and do the same for the edges, piping your face on to how you'd like them. Prctice on a piece of paper if you need to to make sure you get them how you want them to look.
7. Set all the cookies aside to set fully. Give them out as is, or put into plasitc loot bags.
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