Halloween is on it’s way! I love all the fun things you can do for holidays–any holiday really! But sometimes life is so busy I don’t have TIME to get fancy. . .
When Walmart asked me to come up with a Halloween project to share I immediately thought of sugar cookie cutouts. I have made some really cute Halloween Monster Cookies in the past, but they do take a bit of time. What I wanted was something that was fun, but super simple to make.
That’s when the idea came to me. . . there MUST be a recipe for chocolate sugar cookies out there somewhere. If I made chocolate sugar cookies, they would already be dark brown. That’s the perfect color for coffins, bats and witches hats. Instead of using royal icing, outlining the cookies and flooding them with slightly thinner icing, I could just let the color of the cookie be the color!
Walmart had a bunch of cute Wilton Halloween cookie cutters including this set with a gravestone, bat, coffin and more. (I bought mine last year, so the bat is a bit different)
So I had the cookie cutters, now to find a good recipe. I went to Pinterest (doesn’t everyone?) and found some chocolate cookie cutouts on Bake at 350. I liked that particular recipe because the cookies weren’t supposed to spread when you cooked them–so they should look exactly the same shape when cooked as when you cut them out. They were a mix and roll type recipe, no chilling the dough for an hour which met with my “keep it simple” philosophy. (note: this recipe contains no leavening, which made me nervous–but I figured with all the good comments I was pretty safe!)
Also a lot of the comments mentioned they tasted great!
I mixed up a batch and then rolled them out. A great tip for these cookies was to mix cocoa powder with your flower for dusting the rolling surface. That way you don’t wind up with chalky white on your cookie. Place your cutouts on some parchment paper–you can usually find it at Walmart either over by the tin foil and stuff, or else over in the Wilton Cake Decorating section.
The recipe from Bake at 350 said to put your cookies in the freezer for 10 minutes before cooking. So I did.
Then I popped them in the oven and baked them. They came out great–perfectly shaped, no spreading and tasting like a brownie made into a cookie!
Now for decorating. My initial idea was to whip up some royal icing, but honestly I was out straight all week and the idea of pulling out the mixer again, along with the icing bags and tips just was too much. I stored them overnight and the next day I headed back into Walmart for my errands and picked up a bag of Betty Crocker Cookie Icing. It was less than $3, comes with the tip already attached, and the icing dries hard. Works for me!
Now you don’t have tons of control with this icing, so go slowly and practice on paper or something first. I was able to dress up the bats with just a couple of dots, the hats with a quick band, and the coffins with an outline and RIP. (The R & P were difficult to keep from filling in but not impossible once you got the knack).
They look great, and were super simple to make.
And here’s a pro tip–want an easy way to clean your cookie cutters? Next time you buy a bag of onions or oranges at Walmart, keep the plastic netting they come in. Simply toss all your cookie cutters inside and tie a knot or secure with a rubber band. Then toss it in the top rack of your dishwasher. Easy–and they don’t wind up blowing all over.
So this Halloween make yourself some simple chocolate sugar cookie cutouts! It would be super cute if you also made regular sugar cookie dough, kept part of it plain to cut out ghosts, and dyed part of it orange for pumpkins!
Want some more great Halloween ideas?
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Disclosure: As a participant in the Walmart Moms Program, I’ve received product samples and compensation for my time and efforts in creating this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Very cute and easy!