The cookie headstones can be made the day before you plan to serve the cupcakes. Cupcake wrappers with a Halloween design—pumpkins or picket fences and haunted houses—would be perfect.–Annie Rigg
LC Creepy Cakes Note
Remember those haunted tales your teachers would read you on Halloween when you were a kid? Tales of naughty kids who snuck into spooky cemeteries and were never heard from again, told in hushed tones with dramatic pauses? Yeah. Those sorts of stories-with-a-moral were about as popular with us as those home movies from the 1960s they made us watch in Driver’s Ed that were supposed to scare us from ever drinking and driving. Our level of tolerance for fright night drama is more along the lines of these creepy Halloween cupcakes. And if for some silly reason we do get scared for a second, all we have to do is take a lick of frosting. A heck of a lot easier than sprinting around actual headstones and scaling a wrought iron fence.
Special Equipment: piping bag; card templates for cross-shaped headstones
Graveyard Halloween Cupcakes Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 batch 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
- 1. Prepare your cookie dough recipe, cover, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or according to the recipe instructions.
- 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.
- 3. When the cookie dough is ready, preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C) and arrange a rack in the center position. 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 will need 12 crosses, plus a couple extra to allow for breakages. Arrange the dough on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or as the recipe instructs—essentially until they are firm and lightly browned at the edges. Let cool completely on the baking sheets.
- 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.
- 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.
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