Sugar Skull Cookies

Sugar Skulls are traditionally made as a gift during the Dia De Los Muertos celebrations for family members that have passed on. Typically, these are skulls made out of meringue powder and granulated sugar to make a 3D mold of a skull, and then are decorated with bright colors of icing and foil The sugar skulls are left at graves or altars to welcome the loved one's spirits that come back to mingle with the living for 24 hours on October 31st. (Check out http://www.mexicansugarskull.com for lots of history and facts about sugar skulls!)

Over the last couple of years, I've had a ton of requests to face paint the Dia de los Muertos sugar skull design on Halloween celebrators. These are super fun to paint because there's so much room for creativity and color! Here are a couple of previous designs I've done:

Going for a cool blue, Aztec inspired pattern, with lots of triangles and edges.

More color here, inspired by the flowers and Erin's outfit, along with flowers, spider, and the typical skull teeth outline.

I thought it would be fun to try out sugar skull cookies- working with different colors and designs! To make these cookies, I used this delicious fudgy, chocolate cookie recipe (Thanks, Shiran!), and laid out the cookie dough in a thin layer with a somewhat skull shape- round on the top, square jaw on the bottom. They ended up baking out in ovals, which worked perfectly.

I tried Betty Crocker's buttercream frosting recipe that was MUCH sweeter than I typically make, which, works for the purpose of a sugar skull! Just beware when you bite into these, you'll experience a sugar rush like no other. I needed to add a little bit more milk for a smoother consistency of the icing. I used Kroger's neon food coloring to get some pretty pops of color- neon green, purple, pink, and a standard yellow.

Instead of using tips, I opted into just cutting tiny holes into my disposable-but-I-reuse-them piping bags, so that I wouldn't have to clean out the bag each time I wanted to reuse the tip.

The results were fun, bright, and delicous! I had help from my girl, Regan- our styles are very different, but unique to each of us. See if you can guess whose is whose!

These guys didn't last for long, though! The fudgy cookie is so soft, these were gone in a heartbeat. Next time, I'm definitely going to take more time with smoothing out the edges of frosting and working more on shape. These are available for Halloween order- let me know if you want a batch of these for your Halloween party!