Kooky Cookies

Boo!

Around our house, we prefer to make Halloween a little more kooky than spooky.  This week, we got into the kooky Halloween spirit by baking monster themed sugar cookies with inspiration from one of our favorite artists, Ed Emberley.

If you and your kids have any interest in learning how to draw, you must grab one of Ed Emberley’s drawing books.  These art instruction books teach the reader how to draw faces and all kinds of characters using basic shapes and squiggles.  Ed Emberly’s teaching method is basic enough for a child to enjoy, and the characters you draw are just fantastic.  So fantastic, that when we decided to bake sugar cookies with monster faces, we knew we  absolutely had to use this particular book as inspiration.  Oh, and it’s under $5.00, so how perfect.

For the cookies themselves, we went with classic cut-out cookies with royal icing for decoration. These cut-out cookies are great because you can bake them and freeze them for decorating at a later time, (Maybe grab those Christmas cookie cutters while your are at it)!  When decorating these cookies with kids, you may want to consider a few of our favorite royal icing tips and tricks:

1. Pipe royal icing around the border of each cookie

2. Add a tablespoon of water (or more if desired) to a bowl of icing to make it easier to spread

3. Using a teaspoon, spoon the icing from the bowl onto the cookie and use the back of the  spoon to gently spread the icing to the borders

4. Let the icing set for about thirty minutes before letting the kids decorate.  This will ensure the base icing is set and won’t mess up their great decorations.

One thing that I really loved about this baking project, is that you usually see cookies with royal icing being so perfect and fancy, but in this case the crazier they turned out, the better.  We were making silly monster faces, so I encouraged the kids to just relax have fun “drawing outside the lines.”

All in all, these cookies were a blast to make and the project as a whole was quality time at it’s finest.  I can promise you that when you bake these cookies with your kids, you will have a sweet and kooky memory that no one will forget.  Let us know how your cookies turn out!

Happy Halloween!

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Basic Royal Icing

Adapted from Lorann Professional Kitchen

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup cold water
• 1/4 cup meringue powder We used Loranne
• 4 cups confectioner's sugar

Instructions

1. Whisk cold water and meringue powder in stand mixer until stiff peaks form  

2. Sift confectioner's sugar

3. Add confectioner's sugar to other ingredients in mixer, and combine until smooth.

4. Add food coloring as needed