These spooky graveyard cupcakes are made from your favorite sugar cookie, cupcakes (even store-bought), royal icing, and chocolate cookie crumbs. Make sure the kids help you with these!
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 .–David Leite
Special Equipment: piping bag; cross cookie cutter or card templates for cross-shaped headstones
Graveyard Halloween Cupcakes
Ingredients
- 1 batch your favorite roll-out cookie dough, any flavor, whether sugar or butter or gingerbread or chocolate or Swedish spice
- 12 cupcakes
- All-purpose flour, for the work surface
- Royal Icing
- Black food coloring paste
- 1 batch chocolate frosting
- 6 Oreo cookies
- Mini fondant or marzipan pumpkins (optional)
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.
If you make this recipe, snap a photo and hashtag it #LeitesCulinaria. We'd love to see your creations on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.