Welcome to my fourth and final entry for Halloween Treats Week! Today I’m going to show you how to make easy decorated Halloween Shortbread Cookies. Here’s recipe the for decorated shortbread cookies, or you can use your favorite sugar cookie recipe to make these iced Halloween cookies.
You don’t need to be a super artist to make cute decorated cookies. All you need is some royal icing, and a variety of ready made decorations, sprinkles, candy eyes, etc. I was able to use lots of treats from this year’s sponsors!
Speaking of which, this is a sponsored post in support of Halloween Treats Week. All opinions are my own.
For ease of browsing, you can find all my cookie and bar recipes in one place. Enjoy!
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.
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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!
I hope you’ve learned something from this post or that you’ve decided to make the recipe.
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Decorated Halloween Shortbread Cookies
Start with your favorite shortbread or sugar cookies and then use your imagination to decorate them for Halloween! You don't need any special decorating skills to make these easy decorated Halloween shortbread cookies, just a few items from the decorator aisle at the grocery store or at a craft and hobby shop!
Here's the recipe for decorated shortbread cookies. I also used royal icing from Family Spice which is linked in the NOTES section below.
Ingredients
- 24 shortbread cookies
- Royal Icing (about 3 cups)
- food coloring in the colors of your choice
- decorator sprinkles, jimmies, candy eyes, etc. Have fun shopping in the decorating aisle at your grocery store or craft and hobby store!
Instructions
- Take stock of all your decorations and decide how you would like to combine them to decorate each cookie. Depending on how many different decorating ingredients you have, you can decorate all the cookies the same or make them all look different.
- Cover your work space with a large sheet of parchment or use Counter Covers from Wilton. They're huge.
- Arrange all your decorations in one place, being sure to use piping tips when necessary.
- Have your baked and cooled cookies on a tray nearby so you can pick up each cookie, decorate it, and then carefully place it back on the tray.
- For flooded cookies like the ghost cookies, outline the cookie with stiff royal icing and then flood the interior of the cookie with thinner icing. Add decor, sprinkles, sparkle gel, etc as you like.
- Continue decorating the cookies as simply or as intricately as your time/talent/patience allows.
- Once you have finished decorating each cookie, allow the royal icing ones to set up for 24 hours so the icing is completely hard. For any cookies you decorate with decorator icing and/or sparkle gel, arrange them in a single layer in a lidded container until time to serve.
Notes
I use the royal icing recipe from Family Spice.
Nutritionals are for 1 shortbread cookie without decoration.
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Nutrition Information
Yield 24 Serving Size 1Amount Per Serving Calories 70Total Fat 3gSaturated Fat 1gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 2gCholesterol 0mgSodium 45mgCarbohydrates 9gFiber 0gSugar 4gProtein 1g
The stated nutritional information is provided as a courtesy. It is calculated through third party software and is intended as a guideline only.
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Karen says
Those are super cute!! I always get so nervous using royal icing but you do make it seem easy!
Jennifer Field says
Thanks! Believe me, I rarely decorate cookies bexaise I don’t have the patience for it. Hence the easy designs! Thank goodness for fun candy eyes too!