Sugar cookies are great to make for holidays. They can be  a lot of fun to decorate! Since it is fall, I took my normal sugar cookie recipe and changed it up a little bit to make it full of spices and perfect for fall!

I used chocolate chips to add cute little spiders to mine on some and even tried to make the frosting look blood splattered. Also Candy Red hots make great eyes if you have any skull shaped cookie cutters! So many ways to decorate these cookies for Halloween… or really any holiday!

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Spiced Sugar Cookie Cut Outs

Ingredients:

  • 3/4 Cup Unsalted Butter (Softened)
  • 1/2 Cup Granulated Sugar
  • 1/4 Cup Brown Sugar
  • 1 Egg
  • 2 Teaspoons Vanilla Extract
  • 2 1/4 Cup All-Purpose Flour
  • 1/2 Teaspoon Baking Powder
  • 1/4 Teaspoon Salt
  • 1/2 Teaspoon Ground Cloves
  • 1 Teaspoon Ground Nutmeg
  • 1 Teaspoon Ground Cinnamon

Frosting:

  • 1 Can Vanilla Frosting
  • 1 Cup Powdered Sugar
  • 4-5 Teaspoons Milk

Directions:

1. In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, spices, and salt. Set aside.

2. Cream the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add the egg, beat well after this addition. Next, add the vanilla extract.

3. Gradually add in the flour, baking powder, salt mixture. Once combined, the dough should be well-formed and not be sticky to the touch.

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4. Chill the dough in your refrigerator for at least 1 hour. Once it has been chilled, remove from the fridge. The dough may be hard, so let it sit for a minute or two.

5. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper if you want easier clean up later.

6. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough about 1/4 inch thick. Cut the dough out into whatever shapes you desire.

7. Place your cut outs on the baking sheet about one inch apart. These will not spread out at all so they don’t need to be spaced very far apart. If you want you can add red-hot candies or chocolate chips to the cookies. This is a great way to decorate them if you don’t plan on frosting them later

8. Bake cookies for 10-12 minutes or until the edges turn golden brown. These cookies will puff up slightly. You will want to remove them from the oven before they get to dark, so after about 8-9 minutes, keep a close eye on them.

9. Allow cookies to cool on a wire cooling rack. Once cooled you can begin to frost them. If you want to make spiders out of any chocolate chips you added you can use a toothpick to draw lines out from the center of each chocolate chip before it cools.

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For my cookies, I combined a store-bought can of frosting with some milk so that the frosting was thin enough drizzle over the cookies that I was too lazy to spend time frosting and I have to say I like how they came out!

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I also tried a blood splatter effect by mixing some food coloring with water and dripping it over normal white frosting. Makes them perfectly decorated for Halloween without adding to much extra work.

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Frosting Flooding

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10.  For the flooding technique, you will want to mix a little bit-maybe 2-3 Tablespoons  of the store-bought frosting with a teaspoon of milk. The frosting should be thin enough to pipe, but not so runny that it spreads out.

11. Fill a piping bag and pipe around the edge of the cookie. Outline the edges of all your cookies.

12. Next you will want to add an additional 1-2 teaspoons of milk to get the frosting even thinner.  Using a spoon, or piping bag, starting with the center of each outlined cookie, fill the cookie with frosting and spread it so that it is evenly coated all the way to the edge. If there are any air bubbles in your frosting, use a toothpick to pop them!

13. Let the cookies sit out on a flat surface until the frosting has hardened, then store in an air tight container.