Halloween Sugar Cookies with Sugar Frosting

We have fun making sugar cookies for each big holiday, and I love letting the kids have fun cutting the shapes out and decorating how they want.
These photos are obviously not a professional sugar cookie decorator, like what you'd find at your supermarket bakery, but they are fun and made with love and taste amazing!

D-Man and RiRi decorated most of them, with a few done by myself. I think they came out adorable!

We made our own cookie mix, as well as our own icing. The sprinkles we bought, as well as some glitter gels. This made for a fun, and very messy evening, but the kids love it and this is where priceless memories are made!



Ingredients:

Sugar Cookie Dough:

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter or margarine, softened to room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2-1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Homemade Sugar Frosting:

• 1 cup confectioners (or powdered) sugar
• 2 teaspoons milk
• 2 teaspoons light corn syrup (if you don't have light corn syrup, you can make it with 1-1/4 cups sugar + 1/3 cup water. Boiled together until syrupy. Use quickly before it hardens!)
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Directions:

Cream together the sugar with your butter or margarine.
I go into more detail here, if you need help with this.

Once creamed, add your eggs and vanilla until blended well.

In a separate bowl, combine your dry ingredients. Flour, baking powder and salt.

Add your dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, and mix until just combined. 

Now, once dough is all mixed together place in a tupperware or airtight container and refrigerate at least one hour. I refrigerated overnight.

Once the dough has been refrigerated at least an hour, get your rolling station prepared.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Roll out your dough on a flat surface sprinkled with powdered sugar so it doesn't stick.
Roll until dough is between 1/2 inch to 1/4 inch thick.

Roll the dough just a little at a time so you're not handling it too much, that will produce harder cookies the more you manipulate your dough.
Once the little portion of dough is rolled out, start placing the cookie cutters on the dough.
(Don't mind my zebra band aid! haha!)

Keep the cookie cutters in place, and remove the dough around them. This is the easiest way to ensure your cookies will hold shape as you cut them all out.

Add the remaining dough that you just removed to your next batch to unroll and continue cutting out cookies until all dough has been used.

Place all your cookies on a baking sheet lined in foil, and bake for 6-8 minutes.
They are done when the edges just start to get a little golden!

While the cookies are baking, start making your sugar icing.
This icing is great, it tastes good and dries hard.
You can add food coloring to the icing as well, otherwise it will be white in color.
For these cookies, I decided to keep it white, and decorate with the sprinkles and gel, but you can get really creative with it! You can make multiple batches in different colors and get fancy.

To make the icing, combine the confectioners sugar with the milk until smooth. Then beat in the corn syrup and almond extract until the icing is smooth and glossy. If the icing is too thick, you can add a little more corn syrup. This stuff tastes great, and I love the combination of almond extract in the icing with the vanilla in the cookies.

Shortly after the cookies are removed from the oven, start painting the icing on to them, if you're using sprinkles add them quick! This icing dries fast!

Now start decorating! Get creative with it, and it's ok if they aren't perfect because they taste great!

This recipe makes about 30 cookies, but you can double it and have yourself a cookie decorating party!
Ours got a bit messy, I had powdered sugar everywhere, but it was so fun!

Enjoy!