Happy Halloween! It’s a holiday meant for spooky sweet treats, and these Halloween sugar cookies are the perfect way to start the celebration off right! This is a recipe for my classic sugar cookies with royal icing, cut out and decorated for Halloween. While you can use anything you want to decorate them, I try to dye my royal icing with natural ingredients such as chocolate and turmeric to give these cookies classic Halloween colors without added chemicals.
Halloween Sugar Cookies:
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, room temperature
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
Royal Icing:
- 1 egg white
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- 2-3 cups of powdered sugar
- Food coloring of your choice (optional)
- ¼ tsp water if needed + additional ¼ tsp water depending on how thick you want your icing
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk the flour and baking powder in a medium bowl to blend. Using an electric mixer, beat the sugar, butter, and vanilla in a large bowl to blend. Beat in the egg and mix to fully combine. Add all of the flour mixture in 2-3 batches, and beat just until blended.
Split the dough in half, and form them into round disks, about 2 inches thick. Tightly wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least one hour.
NOTE*** I have rolled and cut out the cookies without chilling the dough, and while the cookies still come out great, the dough is a little harder to work with. If you have the time to chill the dough, I recommend it, but if not, just make sure you use extra flour on your work surface and rolling pin to ensure that the dough doesn’t stick to anything.
Working with one disk at a time, roll out the dough to about ¼- ½ inch thick, on a well-floured surface and cut out with your favorite festive cookie cutters. I used pumpkins, bats, and ghosts, but you can use whatever you like. There a lot of fun Halloween cookie cutter sets out there, so have fun with it!
Bake at 350 degrees for 6-7 minutes. Let cool on pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack.
To make the icing, mix egg white, and vanilla until frothy, then beat in the powdered sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, or by hand with a whisk.
NOTE** This icing recipe is a guideline, and I tend to add more powdered sugar/water depending on what I want to do with the icing. If you want it thicker, add more sugar. If you want it a little thinner and runnier, add more water ¼ tsp at a time.
Make sure the cookies are fully cooled before you ice them. If you ice them when they are warm, the icing will just run off. You can have fun decorating the cookies and spend time with details, or if you want something simple and beautiful, just pick one color icing, and using a knife, frost all of the cookies in the same color for a cool, monochromatic look. To have a sleek iced look without spread marks, make the icing a touch thinner. This will ensure that when it dries, you don’t see the marks from where you spread it onto the cookie and it will look like one even coating.
Use your favorite food coloring to dye the icing, or you can use natural products as well. I used unsweetened coco powder and a bit of melted chocolate to make brown frosting for bats, and used turmeric (it really has almost no flavor) to make orange icing for the pumpkins. You can also use fruit or beets to make red dye.
What I did for these cookies was divide the icing into three batches. I added about ½ tsp turmeric to dye 1/3 of the icing orange, added 1 tbs unsweetened coco powder + 1 tbs melted semi-sweet chocolate to dye 1/3 of the icing brown, and left 1/3 of the icing plain for the ghosts.
I put each color of icing in a ziplock bag and cut a tiny hole in the corner to use it as a piping bag to pipe the icing onto these cookies, but you could definitely just frost these cookies with a knife.
[Click here to watch video on how to pipe icing with a ziplock bag]
Whichever method you use, these Halloween sugar cookies will look and taste great!
Let the iced cookies set up and dry for about an hour so icing dries, and enjoy these spooky sweet Halloween sugar cookies!
