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Spooky season is upon us and it’s nearly time for Halloween! I’ve never really celebrated Halloween very much – I occasionally do a Halloween themed makeup look, pop up the odd bit of Halloween decor and carve a pumpkin, but that’s about it. This year, though, I wanted to start a new tradition: halloween cookie decorating! I experimented with a few different ways to decorate halloween biscuits, mostly inspired from various Pinterest ideas. To make things easy for others who want to replicate these designs, I thought I’d create some easy step by step instructions to teach you how to decorate halloween biscuits.
Before we get stuck in with icing and decorating our biscuits, you might be thinking ‘…but how do I MAKE halloween biscuits?!’. My go to basic biscuit recipe is the BBC Good Food recipe, but I normally end up adding half to one cup extra of flour, as I find the recipe makes too wet a dough. It’s a quick recipe that comes together in as little as five minutes. I then roll the dough using a rolling pin, cut the shapes out and bake at 180°C for around 10 minutes. Be warned though – they can catch very quickly, and may even burn in as little as 6-8 minutes if the biscuits have been rolled a little too thin.
For these halloween biscuits, I used some gingerbread men cookie cutters, as I thought they were very versatile and can be used all year round. You can also get more themed halloween biscuit cutters, or simply use a glass or mug to cut circles.
When your biscuits have fully cooled, it’s time to decorate. Be creative and carefree – the great thing about Halloween themed biscuits, is you can be nice and messy. No blood spatter is meant to be perfect, nor is any monster!
To create the icing, mix icing sugar (also known as confectioner’s sugar or powdered sugar) and water into a thick icing. A thicker mixture will be easier to pipe, so you may need to add more sugar or water to get to the perfect consistency.
To colour the icing, I use Sugarflair – a small amount goes a long way. I simply poke a cocktail stick into the paste, swirl this into my bowl of icing, mix with a spoon and voila! Vibrant coloured icing.
The next step of icing halloween biscuits is preparing the piping bags. I pour my icing into sandwich bags with a tiny bit of the corner snipped off with scissors, but you can also buy piping bags. Remember to wash and reuse the sandwich and piping bags afterwards to avoid single use of the plastic. You can then twist the top of the sandwich bag, hold it in your palm, and gently apply pressure to squeeze the icing through the hole.
Want a sweet treat but don’t want to bake? Check out this edible cookie dough recipe!
Mummy biscuits are definitely the easiest to decorate as it doesn’t matter if they are messy! Start by sticking two edible eyes onto the biscuits, then pipe white icing back and forth to replicate a wrapped and preserved mummy.
Monster biscuits are possibly my favourite of the Halloween biscuits I created. I used Ghoulish Green Sugarflair coloured icing to ice the whole shape of the biscuit, and then pop some edible eyes onto your Monster. You could even experiment with cyclops monsters by putting only one eye in the head, or alien monsters by adding antennas!
Zombie biscuits look super effective for Halloween. You can use white icing to pipe the faces or use edible eyes – I experimented with a few different facial expressions as you can see in the photos. Then – the fun bit – snap random body parts off! The next step is to use Blood Red Sugarflair coloured icing to pipe blood onto the body parts. You can experiment with blood splatters, cuts and drips too.
Skeleton biscuits are a little tricky, as the piping needs to be a little more precise. You simply want to use white icing to pipe the ‘bones’ of the skeleton, and then use black liquorice Sugarflair coloured icing to pipe the face. It’s a little tricky – you need a steady hand.
I’m a firm believer that toddlers can enjoy all food in moderation, as part of a healthy diet. That being said, there is a lot of sugar in these biscuits, so you probably want to break off part of the biscuit and only give them a small amount. It’s also wise to serve sweet treats with dinner – not afterwards – so that toddlers do not see these foods as more attainable than others. Try avoid serving sweet treats with orange juice or as a snack, as this may cause more tooth decay than serving as part of a meal, with water. If you are making halloween biscuits for toddlers, try to choose a food colouring with no E numbers and additives, or experiment with natural food colourings.
