Are you looking for a crazy easy Halloween cookie recipe that will WOW everyone? Look no further! This frighteningly easy sandwich cookie recipe requires little to no prior baking experience and can be modified for nearly any holiday. Read on and prepare to add MAJOR cool points to your Halloween cookie platter this year!
Hey there fellow Halloween lover! I’m glad you’re here because I’m really excited to share my incredibly easy Halloween cookie recipe with you. These soft, melt-in-your-mouth sugar cookies are filled with fresh vanilla buttercream icing and generously dipped in spooky Halloween sprinkles!
As promised, there will be no complicated recipes found here, just Pinterest-worthy Halloween cookies that are deceptively easy to achieve. I guarantee everyone will want to ‘gram these before they devour them!
While I consider myself a proficient baker, I’ve made attempts over the years and baking sugar cookies from scratch has never turned out well for me. Enter my savior, that pudgy, giggly lil sucker, the Pillsbury Doughboy! Pillsbury has these place-and-bake “Shape” sugar cookies with holiday images on them. This year for Halloween, they have both pumpkin and ghost designs. You will find them near the ready to bake biscuits and crescent rolls at grocery stores (each package has 24 cookies and will make a dozen sandwich cookies). I’d describe my frighteningly easy Halloween sandwich cookies as tasting like the much-loved soft and cakey Lofthouse cookies, only with that sweet, sweet frosting on the INSIDE – YUM!
Speaking of frosting, while you’re baking the cookies (which takes about 10-12 minutes in a 350 degree oven) have fun making your buttercream icing and then get to decorating! This is the creative part where your imagination is the only limitation. After leaving my icing white the first time, I decided they needed some OOMF for Halloween so I dyed my next batch of frosting orange and purple using gel food coloring (purchased at Michaels Crafts). I chose to pipe my frosting on with a star tip so I got those fabulous ribbons of icing to grab onto more SPRINKLES!
Buttercream icing is very simple to make. It’s comprised of butter, powdered sugar, vanilla extract and heavy whipping cream (which is optional). The only tool you need is a stand mixer. No, a hand mixer won’t do – the butter will burn your motor out. If you don’t have one, this recipe is just as tasty made with store-bought icing. And holy cow, how much easier could this possibly get at that point, right? Pillsbury even sells icing already in a piping bag! Store bought icing won’t harden and “set up” like buttercream will. What that means is the icing may squish out easier when you bite into one – that’s about it. If you want to stiffen store bought icing, you can add powdered sugar to it. Yes, it will be very sweet, but effective!
I followed this recipe for traditional buttercream icing and it came out perfect – I highly recommend it! The ratios for American buttercream frosting are easy to remember. For every stick of butter (1/2 cup) add 2 cups powdered sugar. A splash of milk or heavy cream between cups of powdered sugar helps to smoothly blend the ingredients and incorporate air to achieve a lighter fluffier icing.
I must confess that the concept for these Halloween sandwich cookies was born from my deep, burning desire to use these gorgeous FANCY SPRINKLES. When I saw their Halloween sprinkles, I couldn’t pass them up. Now I’m plotting to put sprinkles on EVERYTHING! EEK!
These cost more than grocery store sprinkles, but they LOOK and TASTE fantastic! Stores like Target and Michaels carry specialty Halloween baking ingredients and edible decorations, so you don’t have to be purchase them online – just use what you can find and comfortably afford.
What you need
- Pillsbury Halloween Shape sugar cookies
- Frosting (homemade or store bought)
- SPRINKLES!
Tips and Tricks
- After you place the cookies on your baking sheet, allow them to warm up a bit before baking. This will help them spread out and give more space for frosting!
- Once the dough has softened slightly, gently flatten the cookies with the bottom of a measuring cup before baking to help them spread out even more.
- After flattening each unbaked cookie, the edges cracked open, so I used my fingers to pinch the cracks closed and re-shaped the cookies to make them uniformly round.
- Take the cookies out of the oven immediately when the bottom edges barely begin to turn brown. Allow them to continue “cooking” on the cookie sheet outside the oven for 2-3 minutes before moving to your cooling rack.
- Make sure the cookies are completely cooled before frosting them. Heat and frosting aren’t besties.
- Buttercream frosting gets stiff after a short time, so adding sprinkles should be done very soon after frosting them. Otherwise, the sprinkles won’t stick! EEK! I frosted 3-5 cookies at a time, then dipped the edges in sprinkles, set them aside and continued frosting.
- You can easily convert this recipe for any holiday that Pillsbury makes cookies for – Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas – You know, other reasons to buy SPRINKLES!
Leave me a comment if you try my Easy Halloween sandwich cookie recipe and let me know how you liked them!
