Crazy for Crust: Halloween Pumpkins

Happy Friday everyone! It's All-Food Friday here and we're celebrating Halloween!

I love Halloween. Actually, I love any holiday where I can bake desserts into a shape that represents that holiday, and Halloween is no exception. It is the desserts-that-look-like-something-else holiday.

I thought, instead of making sugar cookie cutouts that looked like pumpkins, why not make pumpkin cookie cutouts that were actually pumpkin? I went searching for a recipe for "pumpkin cut out cookies" and came up with...a lot of sugar cookies that looked like pumpkins.

So I went to my recipe binder (yes, it's a binder, complete with page protectors and hundreds of magazine pull outs and printed recipes) and found a pumpkin cookie recipe that a friend of mine had given me years ago that was very tasty. It wasn't a cutout cookie recipe, and I worried that it wouldn't roll out like a regular sugar cookie would (less butter). But, with a little tweaking, it came out great, and I have cute pumpkins and jack-o-lantern's to show for it.

The main thing I made sure to do to make it cutout-friendly was to refrigerate the dough. For a long time. It was in the refrigerator for 4 hours before I rolled it out. I know it's hard to wait that long, but overnight would work just as well (or even better). It would spread out the time spent in the kitchen, too.

The other thing I made sure to do was to use a LOT of flour when rolling. I've always been afraid to use too much flour (memories of being told "don't use too much or your cookies will be tough!") but it's necessary here. The dough is really sticky and you need to have all that flour to be able to use the rolling pin and cookie cutter.

See all that flour? But it worked - no sticking!

They didn't spread in baking and they held their shape. Perfect for icing!

I really wanted to make Royal Icing for these cookies. You always see cookies in magazines that look perfect (and are easily stack-able), and that's because they are made with Royal Icing. Royal Icing has meringue powder in it which makes the icing harden. However, with beauty comes time. And I was impatient today, so I used the glaze recipe that came with the cookie recipe. And it worked pretty good.