FHE Halloween Cookie Activity

Finished Halloween Spider Cookie

Make these Halloween spider web cookies from scratch for a Halloween season Family Home Evening and serve them at your ward activity or offer them at the door to trick-or-treaters.  Then add this to your favorite Halloween recipes.

Make sugar cookies ahead and freeze them to ease your preparation time for your chosen Monday night. Use the sugar cookie recipe that follows and cut out 3” circles with a biscuit cutter or drinking glass.

Halloween Cookie Recipe

Sugar Cookies (in 3 sized batches = normal, large, huge)

Cream together:

Butter or margarine                        3/4 cup                1 ½ cups              2 1/4 cups

Sugar                                                  1 cup                    2 cups                   3 cups

Eggs                                                    2                            4                            6

Vanilla or almond flavor                1 tsp                     2 tsp                     3 tsp

 

Sift together:

Flour                                                   2 ½ cups               5 cups               7 ½ cups

Baking powder                                 1 tsp                     2 tsp                     3 tsp

Salt                                                     1 tsp                     2 tsp                     3 tsp

 

Blend and chill at least one hour.  Roll 1/8″ to 1/4″ thick on board dusted with flour.  Cut out.  Bake on ungreased baking sheets at 400º for 6 to 8 minutes or until slightly golden.  Freeze, if desired, until you are ready to frost them.

Necessary Ingredients and Supplies

Ingredients for making Halloween spider cookies

 

You will need:

Special frosting (recipe below) — this frosting stays glossy, but hardens.

Toothpicks

Plastic spiders (Wash them well.  If they are rings, snip off the ring part and keep the spiders.)

 

Trimming plastic spiders

 

Squirt bottle (like the ones used for ketchup)

Small spoons

The cookies

When you make the frosting, tint most of it orange and a small part of it black.  Put the black frosting in the squirt bottle.

 

Orange and black cookie icing

 

Frosting Glaze for Sugar Cookies — Hardens, but stays glossy

1 lb powdered sugar

1 Tblsp light corn syrup

Dash salt

Water

Colorless vanilla or almond flavoring

Food coloring

Mix together with enough water to form consistency of cake batter.  Stir out any lumps.  Tint most of the icing orange, and part of it black. Put black icing into the squirt bottle.

Cookie Creation During FHE

Cover your table with scratch paper, newspaper, or parchment paper.  Take a cookie.  Smooth orange frosting onto the cookie with the back of a spoon.

Spooning on orange frosting

 

With the squirt bottle, make a dot of black frosting at the center of the cookie, then two circles around it, with the outside circle being the widest.

Adding spider web design on a sugar cookie with black icing

 

Place the tip of the toothpick on the center dot and drag it to the outside of the circle.  Repeat 5 – 6 times around the cookie, making a web design.

Using a toothpick on cookie icing to create a spider web design

 

Place a plastic spider on the “web.”  Icing will harden and hold the spider in place.  Once the icing is thoroughly hard, cookies can be stacked.  Freezing will dull the frosting, so it’s not recommended.

Decorated Halloween sugar cookie

 

Gale Boyd is the managing editor for ThirdHour.org. She is a Jewish convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has lived all over the world. She has raised 6 Third Culture Kids and is always homesick for somewhere.