Halloween Sugar Cookie Recipe
These cute and spooky Halloween Sugar Cookies make a festive Halloween treat. Made with a soft and chewy sugar cookie dough and decorated with a royal icing. Kid's will love to help make and decorate these cookies!
Servings: 14 cookies
Equipment
Ingredients
For the sugar cookies
- 1/2 cup salted butter softened
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 large whole egg
- 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tablespoon corn starch
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
For the Icing/Decoration
- 2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
- 2-3 tablespoons milk
- food coloring of your choice I used orange, green, and black
- edible candy eyes optional
Instructions
To make the cookies
- In a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, with an electric mixer or paddle attachment, add the butter and sugar to a mixing bowl and beat until smooth and creamy.
- Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat until combined.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, corn starch and salt.
- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold together until combined into a smooth dough.
- Shape the dough into a ball with your hands, cover in plastic wrap and place in the fridge to chill for 1 hour.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Roll out the dough out with a rolling pin to approximately ¼” thickness and cut out shapes using your Halloween cookie cutters.
- Place the cut out cookie shapes on the prepared baking sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes or until the edges start to turn golden brown.
- Leave on the baking sheets for about 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
To make the icing and decoration
- Mix together the powdered sugar and milk until you have a smooth icing. It should be thick enough to pipe but still pourable. To make the different colors, split between a few bowls and mix through a few drops of the food colorings.
- Using a piping bag and narrow tip, pipe lines around the edge of each cookie. For the pumpkins, outline green stem and the rest of the pumpkins in orange. For the ghosts, outline in white.
- Using a wider nozzle, flood the middle of the lines to fill them in. If you need to make the icing a little runnier, add a few more drops of milk. Add the edible eyes to the ghosts.
- If adding a second layer of icing, allow the cookies to dry for at least 30 minutes first.
- Pipe lines on top of the orange pumpkin icing to represent the ridges of the pumpkin. For the ghosts, you can pipe small black circles underneath the eyes for the mouths.
- Leave the cookies to dry in the open air at room temperature for at least 6 hours or preferably overnight before touching or stacking.