I’ve been a total lame-o the past few years on Halloween and haven’t dressed up. I’m generally working, and costumes are a part of the job. This year I had a special treat and had Halloween off, as it fell on a Monday this year. I didn’t dress up, I honestly didn’t even plan on leaving the house, until I discovered that I had no yellow food colouring. Because while I may be a costume-Scrooge, Halloween is the holiday of sugary, tasty things. Don’t worry, I’m not a total Hallow-scrooge – we don’t get trick-or-treaters because we’re in a childfree condo building, so no one cared that I wasn’t in costume and I didn’t have mini candy bars.

I had a baking afternoon and made two recipes I found on Pinterest! Candy corn sugar cookies, and Day of the Dead skull cookies.

The technique to make the candy corns was awesome, and has me thinking about what other holidays I could apply it to, because I love a sugar cookie!

You make lots of dough, press 1/3 of it (still white) into a loaf pan, then dye 1/3 orange, press than on top of the white, dye the last 1/3 yellow, and press that on top. Let it harden up in the fridge for a bit, then cut into slices.

Then cut each slice into 6-7 triangles! I shaved the wrinkly bits off either end, but otherwise not much dough was wasted at all. Certainly much less than rolling it out and using cookie cutters. I love the touch of lemon in this recipe. The triangles are just the right size to eat (REDACTED – embarassed) right out of the cookie tin.

The skull cookies were a bit more involved, even though they look much less polished. I had troubles with the white dough, I ended up having to add some water to get it all to stick together, and then I had a big problem trying to roll the two dough logs to the same diameter. The recipe says to poke the ‘face holes’ through the log, then cut. My problem was that when you do that, the pressure from cutting will distort the faces, so I decided to poke the holes after cutting the disks of dough. I used a big carving fork for the eyes, so I could do both at once, and a butter knife for the mouths.

Above is a pan of cookies before baking. Below, the same pan after baking:

At that point I stopped calling them ‘skull cookies’ and decided they were zombie cookies, because they all look like they’re saying BRAINSSSSSS. When I brought the tin into work, one of the first comments was ‘Oooh, Frankenstein cookies!’ So really, just call them ‘scary face’ cookies and you’re good. I added a little mint extract to the white dough, so they’re choco-mint scary face cookies.

I really want to organize a Christmas cookie swap this year, and the fun afternoon I had baking these has just made me more excited. I’m trying to figure out exactly how I want to do it – I could go the few friends at our house route, or a giant 3-theatre swap if I can figure out the logistics of that.