Spooky Skeleton Cookies

Instead of the customary token bottle of alcohol that everyone always brings to a party, this year I decided to do something a little bit different!

My friends (who have just got married) were throwing a little Halloween bash at their lovely place in Pimlico, and seeing as it was their first party since their epic wedding and return from an even more epic month-long honeymoon (I mean how insanely lucky were they to swing that?!) I wanted to do something that required a little more thought and effort than a stroll to the local off-license.

So these spooky yet sweet skeleton cookies came to be!

So this is how you can re-create these at home:

Mix: 350g plain flour, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 inch grated fresh ginger, 100g butter, 100g dark brown muscavado sugar, 1 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt. 

Then pour in a mix of 2 eggs and 4 tbsp golden syrup all beaten together.

Roll your sleeves up and just get stuck into this gooey mess and get mixing!

After using a little bit of muscle power, your dough will all come together nicely and firm up. 

Divide it into two halves so its easier to work with.

Wrap one of the halves in clingfilm and pop it to chill out in the fridge.

Then get going with the first half. Dust your work surface with flour and roll out the dough into a thin even sheet.

Using a cookie-cutter, cut out the shapes you want (I used a standard gingerbread-man cutter), and lay them out onto a lined baking tray.

Keep going until you've used up all your dough, and then combine the leftovers and re-roll and cut again!

I got about 50 small gingerbread-men shapes out of my dough!

Then pop them into a pre-heated oven at 170 degrees, for about 12 minutes (adjust as per the size and thickness of your cookies).

But this is where you have to be careful!

Because of the dark brown sugar and all the spices, the dough is already a golden colour so its difficult to tell just by eye when they're ready! So use your first batch as your trial - if you lift them off the baking tray with a spatula, the base should be nice and firm when they're ready!

Then line up those golden beauties and let them cool on a wire rack.

Once they've cooled - get to decorating!

First make your icing (or cheat and buy some prepared Royal Icing for decorating!): mix together icing sugar, water and meringue powder to get a thick white paste for piping, and fill a piping bag. You want the nozzle with smallest circular hole.

Then hands steady, and let your imagination run wild!

They turned out to be so sweet with a delicate warm spice to them, and they had a lovely crunch too! They were too scrummy to be spooky at all and went down a treat at the party when everyone got the munchies!

The combination of ginger and cinnamon always reminds me of Christmas though, so I'll definitely be making these again but using more festive shapes - I'm thinking snowflakes and christmas trees - to have with some warm milk on Christmas Eve! Perhaps I'll leave these out for Santa too!

Let me know what shapes and designs you come up with!

Happy baking!