Spooktacular Chocolate Skeleton Cookies
Yay! The oven is back! So, of course I wanted to get right down to the business of baking. I had been wanting to do some Halloween-related blogs this month, so I decided to start with one for Chocolate Skeleton Cookies. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup baking cocoa
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1-1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
- 2 tablespoons 2% milk
Directions
- In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat
- in egg and vanilla. Combine the flour, cocoa and baking soda;
- gradually add to creamed mixture and mix well. Cover and refrigerate
- for 1-2 hours or until easy to handle.
- On a lightly floured surface, roll dough to 1/8-in. thickness. Cut
- with a floured 3-in. gingerbread boy cookie cutter. Place on greased
- baking sheets.
- Bake at 375° for 7-8 minutes or until set. Cool for 1 minute
- before removing from pans to wire racks to cool completely.
- For icing, in a small bowl, combine confectioners’ sugar and milk
- until smooth. Cut a small hole in the corner of a resealable plastic
- bag; fill with icing. Pipe skeleton bones on cookies.
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I started by creaming the butter and sugars together.
Then I added the egg and vanilla.
In a separate bowl, I combined the flour, cocoa powder and baking soda.
Then I mixed that in with the wet ingredients to get a kind of dry dough that broke apart easily.
After it had chilled for an hour, it was a bit easier to work with, though it was still a rather delicate combination. I rolled bits of the dough out onto a silicone mat (for easier cleanup) and then used a gingerbread man cutter to shape the cookies.
The men went into the oven, and unlike some of those ornery gingerbread men I’ve heard of, none of them ran away.
After seven minutes, they came out of the oven to cool.
Once they had reached room temperature, I mixed the icing in a small bowl.
Then, because I didn’t believe that a resealable plastic bag would give the control required to pipe the skeletons as gorgeously as the photo, I used an icing gun.
I love this thing. It is so easy to use and to clean.
I still wasn’t happy with the control factor though.
My skeletons looked “big boned.”
So I tried again, using a chopstick as an icing “quill”, if you will.
Still not perfect, in fact, I am convinced that the original photo on Pinterest was most likely done by a professional baker.
But, they were still delicious. The kids absolutely loved them, and in fact fought over who got the skeletons with the biggest bones because that meant they got more icing. (We’re raising some smart cookies outside of the kitchen as well.)
🙂
