Easy Decorated Halloween Shortbread Cookies

What You Need to Make Decorated Shortbread Cookies for Halloween

Our generous sponsors sent all of the participating bloggers lots of treats. I used Wilton’s 3 piece Halloween cookie cutter set to cut out my cookies.

Here are all the fun items I used to gussie up my iced Halloween cookies:

• Wilton 12 pack Bloody Eyeball Icing Decorations which should be super creepy, but I thought they were really cute!
  
• Wilton Decorating Icing in Orange and Black. To streamline the decorating process, I put the included star tip on the orange tube of frosting and the round tip on the black tube and left them that way. Way less futzing about than washing the tips and switching them.
  
• Wilton Sparkle Gel in Orange and Black gives a nice, sparkly finish to cookies. NOTE: The gel does not harden or crust, so you don’t want to use this if you’re going to pack them up or ship them somewhere.
  
• Wilton Assorted Candy Eyeballs Box I LOVE these eyes. So much fun!
  
• Wilton Sprinkles Test Tube Set with four fun Halloween sprinkle mixes. NOTE: You must place the test tubes back in the holder. They have rounded bottoms and don’t stand up on their own. Especially perilous if you don’t put the lid back on and are working by yourself!
  
• Sweet & Treats Sweet Sprinkles Mix in Haunted House are classic orange, white, and black sprinkles with pumpkin shapes that are perfect for Halloweening up whatever you sprinkle them on.

Other Sponsor Products Used in Making and Decorating These Cookies

Aside from all the Wilton treats and the sprinkles from Sweets & Treats Boutique, I used:

• Dixie Crystals granulated sugar in the shortbread and powdered sugar in the royal icing.
• Adams Extract Vanilla Extract in the cookies and their Clear Van in the icing to keep it bright white.
• Four Food Colors also from Adams Extract. BONUS: These are free of artificial dyes.

How to Keep Your Work Area Clean When Decorating Cookies

Wilton Counter Covers worked beautifully to keep my work surface clean and to make cleanup really easy. And I am a very messy decorator!

I admit I was a little bit skeptical at first, but they are very large and have a dot of Sticky on each corner so they don’t move around.

They worked great! The only downside is that, in a pack of 10, there are 2 bundles of 5 covers each, and they’re all stacked on top of each other before getting folded.

This means you have to unfold five counter covers to get one out and then fold the 4 remaining to put them back in the box.

A slight inconvenience, but I thought I’d mention it.

Thank you, Wilton, for sending the covers along with all the other treats!

How to Outline and Flood to Make Iced Halloween Cookies

The first thing you’ll do is outline right at the edge, or just a little bit in from the edge, of your cookie. The only round tip I had to use was the large round tip that came with the Wilton decorators icing, so that’s what I used.

As you can see in my video and photos, my black outlines are fairly thick, and that was just fine with me. Again, I used the tip that came with the decorating icing, because that was the easiest thing to do!

You can use a small #2 round tip or even a #1 decorating tip to make a thinner outline, and you will want to if you’re going to make anything much more intricate than I did.

Once you have outlined your cookie, use a slightly thinner royal icing to flood in the center of the cookie.

I didn’t use a piping bag for this. I just dropped the royal icing by the spoonful and then spread it out using the back of the spoon.

You will have more control using a piping bag, but I figure not everyone wants to bother with piping, and I wanted to show you that you can flood in simple designs using nothing more than a spoon.

To watch an excellent video tutorial on outlining and flooding cookies with royal icing, watch this video from Amy Duska of Cookies Royale. She shows exactly how to outline and flood sugar cookies with royal icing (4:29 video length)

Before we get to my How To for making Decorated Halloween Shortbread Cookies, please check out all the other bloggers’ recipes for our last day of Halloween Treats Week!

And don’t forget to scroll down past the recipe so you can enter the giveaway!

Soft Black and White Cookies for Halloween

If you prefer soft cookies to crunchy cookies, you can’t do much better than Halloween black and white cookies. Soft lemony cookie-cakes that are usually iced half vanilla, half chocolate get a Halloween makeover with orange, white, and black decorations.

If you have questions about this post or recipe, don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can leave a comment on the post and I will get back to you within about 24 hours.

If your question is more urgent, please shoot me an email, and I will respond within 4 hours, unless I’m asleep.

What You’ll Find in This Recipe

Since cookies can be a very personalized expression, I am not giving you a recipe per se or step by step on how to make the designs I made. I know that if you want to, you will be able to copy what I did from looking at the photographs and watching my video.

Instead, I’m giving you a basic list of decorating tools and ingredients and hoping you’ll take them and run with them to make your own Decorated Halloween Edible Masterpieces!

Disclaimer: These posts and recipes are part of the week-long event, #HalloweenTreatsWeek but all opinions are 100% mine! We would like to Thank our amazing sponsors: Dixie Crystals, Adam’s Extract, Wilton, Sweets and Treats Shop, Treat Street USA and Litehouse! These wonderful sponsors provided the prize packs for our giveaways and also sent samples and products to the #HalloweenTreatsWeek bloggers to use in their recipes.