Friday 31 October 2014

Trick or Treat Cookies

Halloween is the time of the year that I am able to feed my sweet addiction without raising suspicion. Last year I made these chocolate fudge spider web cupcakes and toffee apples, so I thought I’d try something different this year (although I did still make the toffee apples as they are my favourite!).

This year I tried candy-filled cookies (sounds better than sweet-filled biscuits). I’ve seen lots of different cakes recently with sweets spilling out the centre so when I saw these cute Halloween themed biscuits I had to give them a go. I couldn’t find any UK recipes online as they all had American measurements and ingredients I couldn’t get hold of. So I used this BBC food biscuit recipe and followed the instructions from this recipe.

To make the biscuits, simply cream together 250g of butter and 140g of caster sugar before adding in one egg yolk and beating. Once combined, add in the 2 tsp of vanilla essence and 300g of plain flour. 

 

 

It’s as simple as that, whether you are making these for Halloween or for another occasion you can colour the biscuit dough as you please. As you can see I used orange food colouring for my Halloween biscuits, which actually made it look like sweet potato.


I then popped the biscuit dough in the fridge to allow it to firm up to make it easier to cut the shapes out. Once it has been in the fridge for half an hour, roll it out (you want to make sure its thin as you will be stacking three biscuits on top of each other to make one biscuit – but not too thin that they'll burn) and cut your shapes. For each biscuit you will need three biscuits (two whole and one with a missing middle). To make the middle biscuit (where the sweets will hide) find a much smaller cutter, ideally a circle to cut out two circles.



Then bake for around 15 minutes. Once they have been left to cool, the fun begins! In order to stick the three biscuits together I melted white chocolate and coloured it with the same colour food colouring (other recipes suggest to use icing so its up to you). 

 

To create the cookies take a whole biscuit and pipe white chocolate around the outline of the cookie before putting the middle cookie (the one with missing middle) on top, fill the hole with sweets (I using mini chocolate beans from a baking store as m&ms and smarties were too big) and then use more white chocolate to stick the top one on.


And tah-dah!


Happy Halloween!