Halloween Spider Web Cookies
Using just two colours of icing, you can quickly and easily make these fun Spider Web Sugar Cookie, for your Halloween Treats spread!
Cost: $10
Equipment
- Round Cookie Cutters
- Frosting Bags
- Cake Decorating Set (Optional)
- Gel Food Colouring
- Toothpicks
Ingredients
- 1 Batch Sugar Cookies or
- 1 Batch Gluten-Free Sugar Cookies
- 1 Batch Traditional Royal Icing or
- 1 Batch Meringue Powder Royal Icing
Instructions
Roll and bake your cookies.
- Following your recipe directions - especially with regard to chilling! - roll and cut out your cookies - I like doing 3-4" diameter rounds for this.
- Take care to ensure the cookies are of VERY even thickness, for the best results. I like to use a rolling pin with thickness guides to help with that.
- Once the cookies are out of the oven, you can place a piece of parchment over top of the hot cookies and gently press another cookie sheet down - lightly - to flatten any distortion that may have happened during baking. This is optional, but gives a very flat surface to decorate.
- Allow cookies to cool to room temperature.
Prepare Your Icing
- Prepare your royal icing, following the directions in your chosen recipe.
- Take out about ⅕-1/4 of your royal icing. This will be your white, for the spider webs.
- Tint your remaining royal icing. You can do it all the same colour, or divide it into little bowls to tint different colours. I like to do a mix of orange, green, purple, and black,
- Check the consistency of your icing AFTER tinting. When you use a spoon to pick some of the frosting up and drop it back down into the bowl, you’ll want it to smooth out in between 12-18 seconds. (I like to keep it about 12-14 seconds)
- If your icing smooths out and disappears in less than 12 seconds, it’s too runny. Stir a little more powdered sugar in, until it is in the 12-18 second range.
- If your dropped icing takes more than 12 seconds to disappear back into the rest of it, it’s too thick. Add a little water - a few drops at a time - and stir well. Re test, and adjust more as needed.
- Once your icing is all the proper consistency, transfer it to frosting bags.
- For me, I’ll put the colours into bags just as-is. You can use a coupler and round tip if you’d like, I don’t find it worth the hassle. Squeeze any air pockets out the back end, tie off the bag close to the frosting, and do not cut the tip off til you’re ready to use it.
- For the white frosting, I’ll set the frosting bag up with a coupler inside, trim the end, and affix a smallish round tip - usually about a #3. You want it small enough to be relatively dainty, but wide enough that it leaves a thick enough pipe of white frosting to pull out well. Squeeze out air pockets and tie off the bag.
- Cover any frosting not being used, it dries out quickly!
Decorate your cookies
- If you’re doing multiple background colours, decide how many cookies you’ll do in each one, and divide them out. When you get in the groove, it’s easy to do more than you thought you were doing, and not have cookies left for the other colours!
- Grab your first frosting bag, and cut the very end of the tip off. I like to cut enough off as to leave about a ¼" diameter opening.
- Carefully pipe your outer circle, inside the outer edge of your first cookie. I like to leave a it of a border along the outside of the cookie top, as it gives a little room for dragging the icing outward.
- Once the outer edge is piped, quickly - but carefully - fill in the center of the cookie with frosting. You don’t have to pipe all of the frosting in, think of it more as “flooding” - you can use the frosting bag to sort of encourage frosting to spread, as you’d adding more,
- Take your white frosting, and pipe a small circle / blob of frosting in the center.
- Pipe concentric circles of white around the center circle. Note that these don’t have to be perfect, they’re going to get distorted in the next step.
- Once you have all of your circles piped, use a toothpick to draw the frosting out from the center blob. Place the point of one toothpick into the center blob of frosting, and just gently drag it though the icing, ending at the outer edge of icing.
- Wipe your toothpick off, and repeat. Sometimes I’ll just do lines one after another around the circle, sometimes I’ll do one, then go immediately across from it and pull the center out in the opposite direction. Do what feels right to you!
- Once all the lines are pulled out, set the cookie aside to dry, and repeat on your remaining cookies.
Wait!
- Allow the cookies to dry for at least 12 hours, ideally 24.
