Sugar Cookies - for Halloween

Last Halloween, my son, then 10 months old, was dressed as a tiger. This time I got him a pumpkin costume. One of his friend's mom from his playgroup is hosting a Halloween party this week. Decorating these pumpkin-shaped cookies sounded like fun so I decided to make them for his cute little friends.

After scouting for a while, I came across this recipe on Food Network, by Alton Brown. 

Ingredients :

3 cups APF (I used maida)

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tbsp milk

Method :

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and milk and beat further. 

Combine flour, baking powder and salt and add to the above little by little, beating until dough forms.

Divide the dough into two and refrigerate for 2 hours.

This is where I made a big mistake. I made the dough, refrigerated it and went to put my toddler to sleep. I was so exhausted, I decided to bake the cookies the next morning and fell asleep.

When I started rolling the dough the next day, this is what happened :

The dough had become hard and started to crack as I rolled it. I patched it up carefully. Next time I make this I'm going to use up the dough within two hours! 

The recipe asks us to roll out the dough on powdered sugar instead of flour, to 1/4th inch thick. Using a cookie cutter, cut the rolled out dough into desired shape. I used a pumpkin shaped cutter. Remove the extra scraping and keep aside. You can roll them out again for more cookies.

Arrange atleast 1 inch apart on a greased cookie sheet [I lined mine with parchment paper]. 

Bake in a preheated oven at 375ºF for about 7 to 9 minutes [mine took 8 minutes] or till the edges start browning. Cool on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes and transfer onto a wire rack to cool completely. (The centers will be slightly soft but will harden as they cool)

Repeat for the next batch, till you finish all the dough.

To decorate the cookies, I used Wilton's buttercream icing.

I took a little bit of icing and added green food colour. I added orange colour to the rest of the icing. For the black colour, I used store bought icing because I have had terrible experiences trying to colour the icing black. You can even use chocolate chips for the eyes.

To decorate the cookies, the tips I used were 5, 12, 18 and 1M.

Here's hoping my son's little friends enjoy eating these decorated cookies as much as I enjoyed making them.

These cookies go to Food Palate Series.