Halloween biscuits

Life is slowly getting calmer and finally I have time to get back to baking.

First up are some halloween biscuits. I do not really do anything for halloween but perusing blogs and pinterest I have seen some fantastic creations that inspired me to bake a goulish creation for my workmates.

There were two issues, I had time but not a whole lot of it so nothing that would take hours of elaborate decorating. That lead to the second issue, I am not very artistic and have never worked with fondant in my life. Besides which I do not really like fondant icing. So something not too time consuming, halloween-y and tasty. Quite the challenge (for me at least!)

Rooting through the cupboards I realised I had all the ingredients for ginger biscuits, an excellent start, I love ginger biscuits. Further rooting found a gingerbread man cutter, a couple of gel food colourings, and icing sugar. All the components needed for spooky happenings I think.

I decided to make half zombies and half skeltons, this was for two reasons 1) I did not know which one I wanted to make more and 2) I did not know if I could do skeletons and figured if I was really bad they too could be turned into zombies

Gingerbread men

makes ~16 depending on cutter size

125g butter
100g golden syrup
50 grams light brown sugar
50g dark brown sugar
300g plain flour
tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 good tsps ground ginger
1/2 tsp of cinamon

Grease a couple of baking sheets and preheat the oven to 200C/180C FAN. Put the butter, syrup and sugars into a pan and warm gently until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved. 

Mix the dry ingredients in large bowl then stir in the wet ingredients until all the ingredients are incorporated. 

Place a piece of baking parchment on a work top and dust with flour. Roll out the dough to 1/2cm thick and stamp out gingerbread men. Re-roll the trimmings to get more men.

For those gingerbread men doomed to be zombies pull off an arm or a leg. Yes pull. A knife leaves too clean an edge. 

Place the men on the prepared and baking sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes until golden. Transfer the gingerbread men on a wire rack and leave to cool completely.

Skeletons

For the skeletons I made up a simple icing using icing sugar and water. I made it very thick but smooth. I put it into a freezer bag then snipped of the tiniest corner. I then piped my bones onto the skeletons. The scariest thing about these skeletons is their bone anatomy! There are lots of pictures online from very simple to very complex, I plumped somewhere in the middle.

Zombies

I used red gel food colouring and dabbed around the missing limb, dark at the edge, smudging to a lighter stain as I moved further away.

Similar to the white icing for the skeletons I made a red icing and did various eyes and mouths on the zombies. Either crosses for eyes, or angry diagonal slits. Mouths were zig zag teeth or open holes. I added a few scars to each zombie in icing too. Finally I took my green food colouring and  made my zombies look more rotting and dead by dabbing and smudging it around limbs and edges of the zombies.

Warning these are very crunchy biscuits, if you like your biscuits softer these are perhaps not for you.