Monday, October 19, 2015

Homemade Halloween Cookies!


A couple of weeks ago I was looking for another dessert to add to my son, Isaac's homemade lunchables that I've been making and freezing in large quantities. It really does make mornings easier and I only have to make them about once a month. If you would like for me to write a blog post on the lunchables that I make for Isaac please leave a comment below. So, I was looking for something new to make and I thought about sugar cookies and how different they can be by just changing how they are decorated. I had never made sugar cookies before and I decided since it was my first time anyways that I would make them from scratch with homemade icing too! I had a lot of fun making them, Isaac had fun helping with the decorating and they really are so yummy!






The recipe for the sugar cookies was from Stephanie of allrecipes.com.
Click here to view the original recipe.
And the icing recipe was from Lynette of cleverlysimple.com.
Click here to view the original recipe.

This is how I made yummy Halloween inspired sugar cookies with homemade icing!

Ingredients For The Sugar Cookies

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 
1 teaspoon baking soda 
1/2 teaspoon baking powder 
1 cup butter, softened 
1 1/2 cups white sugar 
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I was almost out of vanilla so I used 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1/2 teaspoon of almond extract.)

Materials

measuring cups

measuring spoons
small mixing bowl
large mixing bowl
spoon
mixing spoon or spatula
fork
baking sheet
parchment paper (optional)

My Instructions For The Sugar Cookies


First I preheated the oven to 375 degrees F.


In a small bowl I used a fork to stir the flour, baking soda and the baking powder together and then I set this mixture aside.



In a large bowl, I creamed (stirred with a spatula) the butter and sugar.



Then I mixed in the egg and vanilla (and in my case the almond too because I was almost out of vanilla, so I added 1/2 teaspoon of both) into the butter and sugar mixture. I like to crack the egg into a different bowl or measuring cup so that if any shell gets in, it's easier to get the shell out.




Adding about 1/2 cup at a time, I then mixed in the dry ingredients, I had to have a little help with the mixing because my arms and wrists were extremely tired and achy by this point. Thank you Sean! I will probably use a hand held electric mixer next time.




After mixing all the dough together, I rolled small spoonfuls of cookie dough into small balls and placed them onto an ungreased cookie sheet. I used parchment paper on a pizza pan.


Then I put them in the oven and the recipe says to bake 8-10 minutes or until golden, but mine took 13 minutes. When they were a nice golden color I took them out of the oven to cool.



After a few minutes of cooling, I removed them from the pizza pan and put them on a plate to finish cooling.

Ingredients For The Icing

1 cup of powdered sugar
4 teaspoons of milk

Materials

measuring cup
measuring spoon
small mixing bowl
fork
spoons

My Instructions For The Icing

I combined the ingredients into a small bowl and mixed with a fork. It's that easy and turns out so good! And I was able to ice about 20 small cookies.



I let Isaac ice the first cookie and then he sprinkled it with cute Halloween sprinkles. We used Dallies sprinkles and we got them at Walmart.






Isaac's cookie!


Then I finished icing the cookies and sprinkled them with Halloween sprinkles. The icing dries pretty quickly so I would suggest only icing 1 or 2 cookies at a time and sprinkle them with sprinkles before icing anymore cookies.



After icing some of the cookies with white icing and sprinkles, we decided to mix up some orange icing too! To make orange we mixed in small drops of Wilton's Food Coloring Icing in yellow and red. We could have used a little more coloring, the orange didn't turn out as dark as I would have liked but they are all still very cute and Isaac loves them!



The finished cookies!





Little bat sprinkles! Spooky!


Cute little pumpkin sprinkles!



And one for me to eat! Yummy!


These yummy and easy sugar cookies can really be for any time of the year. I would love to see how ya'll decorate yours!

I hope this blog post was helpful, if you liked it let me know in the comments. Do ya'll have a favorite cookie ya'll like to eat at this time of year? I would love to see some pictures of your cookies and even links to your favorite recipes.

Soft hugs <3