Halloween Cookies | How To Decorate

Halloween Cookies | A Secret Family Recipe

Today we’re going to be baking my family’s secret delicious homemade sugar cookie recipe from scratch.

We will then use delightfully spooky cookie cutters and have fun decorating pumpkins, bats, and ghosts. These cookies are scrumptious and add ghostly joy to any Halloween festivity.

This is a really historic recipe for our family. This is a recipe passed down from my grandmother. It’s a wonderful recipe that yields the best sugar cookies I’ve ever had in my life.

Halloween Cookies | The Recipe

We start with the mixed dry ingredients. So it’s five cups of flour, one teaspoon of baking soda, one teaspoon salt and then mix them together.

Now we’re going to go ahead and put the wet ingredients into a stand mixer and make the dough. So we’re going to start with one cup of shortening and two cups of granulated sugar. I am using cane sugar because that’s what I like best.

Now, we’re going to cream them together until the mixture is light and fluffy and creamy.

Once that’s accomplished, you’re going to beat in two eggs, one teaspoon of vanilla and then one cup of sour cream.

The sour cream is pretty much the secret ingredient. Once that’s all mixed together, we’ll switch from a flex beater attachment to a dough hook. Then we’re going to bring in the dry ingredients. Then we’ll turn this mixture into a dough. 

Then we’re going to put it into a tupperware any kind of storage you could just keep it in this mixing bowl if you wanted to put a little cling wrap over it and then you put it in the fridge for 3 hours minimum to get it nice and chilled. We like to leave it in overnight and then make the cookies the next day. That also spreads the activity into 2 days, which is really fun to do and makes it less overwhelming. Making the dough on day one. Baking and decorating on day 2.

Halloween Cookies | How to Bake

The next step in making our wonderful Halloween cookies is to take the sugar cookie dough out of the refrigerator.

Then, you’re going to take just a section of it, about what you can hold comfortably in two hands and you’re going to preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.  Have a silicone mat out and flour it well. Put your sectioned ball of dough onto it. Then you’re going to just roll it out until it’s about 1/4 inch thick.

We have these really fun Halloween cookie cutters today: a little ghost, a little pumpkin, and a bat.

Now we put them in the oven for approximately 10 minutes but you check them at 8 minutes, because they bake quickly and you don’t want them overcooked. You don’t want any browning around the edges. You let them cool for 10 minutes before you transfer them to an actual cooling station

That’s the best way to do it because they’re going to keep cooking on the inside but if you remove them from the oven at this stage, they will be real soft and delicious on the inside.

So our next step we’re going to be frosting and decorating… the really fun part!

Halloween Cookies | How to Decorate

Now, you can use store bought frosting for this part. You will need brown, white and orange frostings.

They will usually have orange colored frosting in the store around Halloween, so this should be no problem. You can use either white frosting or buttercream (which will read as white), and chocolate frosting for the brown color. You can also make my delicious Buttercream frosting recipe from scratch and then use my favorite food coloring dye to match the perfect colors, if you are so inclined. 

You will also need some candy eyeballs which are so much fun. And then we have some traditional candy corn and a little bit of black writing gel (or dye some buttercream frosting black and using a piping bag with a small writing tip to apply it).

Halloween Cookies | How to Decorate Bat Cookies

For the Bat Cookies, frost them brown, then add the black writing gel and outline the bat, adding wings and a smiling mouth. Use 2 Candy Eyeballs close together as the eyes, and you will have the cutest Halloween bats.

Halloween Cookies | How to Decorate Ghost Cookies

Next we take the ghost shaped cookies and frost them white. Then add the 2 candy eyes, add a smile with black writing gel, and you can even write the word “BOO!” on them too. 

Halloween Cookies | How to Decorate Pumpkin Cookies

Next up, take the pumpkin shaped cookies and frost the base orange and the tiny stalk at the top brown. Then add candy corn for the eyes. And a zig-zag line for the mouth. 

This is such a fun activity to do with family members, especially the little ones. They can just do the frosting and you can do the detail work, or they can proudly do cookies that are all their own. I remember making these cookies with my Mom when I was a little girl, and it is one of the most precious memories I have. 

You can display them on a beautiful platter, but they should be spread out in onwards layer and should not be considered stackable. They will harden a little after drying, but if you want to keep them perfect, do not stack them, but instead, put them on several large platters. 

Halloween Cookies | How Do They Taste?

These truly are the most delicious sugar cookies I’ve ever had. These cookies are absolutely scrumptious and will add ghostly joy to any Halloween festivity. I hope you love them as much as I do!

Happy Halloween!