Graveyard Halloween Cupcakes

Stressed out by Halloween? We understand. Which is why we bring you these adorable and not-too-crazy-intensive Halloween cupcakes. Make the cookie headstones the day before. To give the graves an extra-spooky look, find cupcake wrappers with a Halloween design–pumpkins or picket fences, haunted houses, ghosts. And we won’t tell if you needed to snitch half the batter for the cupcakes because you needed a carb fix just to get these done by deadline. You got this, mom. Originally published Oct 6, 2013.–David Leite

Graveyard Halloween Cupcakes

• Quick Glance
• 1 H
• 1 H, 25 M
• Makes 12

Special Equipment: piping bag; cross cookie cutter or card templates for cross-shaped headstones

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Ingredients

Directions

• Mix the cookie dough
• 1. Make the cookie dough recipe, cover, and refrigerate it for at least 2 hours or according to the recipe instructions.
• Bake or unwrap the cupcakes
• 2. Meanwhile, make and bake your cupcake recipe, using a standard 12-hole muffin pan lined with cupcake liners. Let the cupcakes cool on a wire rack. Or…pull 12 cupcakes out of their supermarket packaging. (Toss the package before those wicked judgy moms at school ever find out, naturally.)
• Bake and decorate the cross cookies
• 3. When the cookie dough is ready, arrange a rack in the center position and crank the oven up to 350°F (180°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
• 4. Lightly dust a clean, dry surface with flour and roll the cookie dough to a thickness of 1/8 inch. Use a cross cookie cutter or place a cross template on the dough and carefully cut around it with a small, sharp knife. You’ll need 12 crosses, but a couple extras are good in case of breakages.
• 5. To decorate, thin the royal icing if necessary to create a consistency for writing and tint it black with a smidgen of the food coloring paste. Spoon the icing into a piping bag and pipe an outline around each cross-shaped cookie headstone. Pipe dates or names on the headstones, too, if you like. Let the icing set.
• Frost and assemble the graveyard Halloween cupcakes
• 6. Crush the Oreo cookies finely in a food processor or put them in a resealable plastic bag, seal, and crush with a rolling pin. They should be fine enough to resemble dirt.
• 7. Cover the top of each cupcake with the chocolate frosting, scatter the crushed cookies over the top, and insert the bottom of the headstone, er, cross-shaped cookie headstone, into the cupcake. If desired, decorate with mini pumpkins.