Halloween is around the corner but we don’t celebrate it. Halloween seasonal foods tempt though, every time I browse Pinterest. I have a dislike for gory and ugly looking food. Can you understand why anyone would want to eat anything that looks like bloody brains, slime, or worms? Give me cute looking food like these Witch Hat Cookies, and I can get on board with that.
My daughter is grown up but when she was a kid still in school she liked cute Halloween food. These Halloween Brownies, Spider Web Cookies, Chocolate Cake with Meringue Ghosts, a variety of Halloween Cupcakes, Hoot Owl Cookies and Spider Cookies, Blood Spattered Cookies, and Oreo Bats should tell you how much she loved them. I’ve even made savoury Halloween treats like Herbed Boo Ghosts and Barmbrack!
This year most my daughter’s cousins are around and the eldest of them has a little boy. He’s at an age where he enjoys fun treats. This basically meant I could give into the temptation to make something cute for Halloween. Witch Hat Cookies were my pick this time.
Witch Hat Cookies are easy enough to make. You need three ingredients – chocolate cookies/ biscuits, coloured icing/ frosting and chocolate kisses. The cookies are the brims of the hat, the chocolate kisses are the domes, and the icing makes the hat bands.
If you’re really short of time, you can use Oreos or any other brand of flat, thin and round chocolate biscuits. I don’t like Oreos so I made the chocolate biscuits. They’re not very fancy but rustic, and I like to think that’s part of their charm. Children aren’t particularly bothered with fancy looking stuff. My grandnephew told me he thought they looked quite nice and tasted really good!
The cookie recipe below makes not too sweet chocolate cookies. The sugar in the chocolate kisses and the icing/ frosting will balance it out. If you choose to make your own cookies you can use this recipe or another one you prefer. Just remember you want a recipe without much leavening as flatter looking cookies are better here.
I used royal icing on my cookies because they dry and harden. It adds a nice texture and also keeps well in my warm climate unlike buttercream. You ca use buttercream too. To make royal icing, beat an egg white till soft peaks form. Beat in a little lime juice, vanilla extract and enough icing sugar till it reaches required consistency (a little thick). Divide and colour as desired.
Witch Hat Cookies
Ingredients
- 125 gm unsalted butter soft at room temperature
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 1/4 cups to 1 1/2flour
- in Royal icing or buttercreamdifferent colours
- Chocolate kisses
Instructions
- Cream the butter and sugars in a largish bowl till soft, fluffy and light in colour. Beat in the egg and vanilla extract.
- Mix in the baking soda, salt, cocoa powder, and about 1 1/4 cup flour. The batter should be slightly sticky. Add a little more flour, a tablespoon at a time, if it’s too sticky. If you add too much flour, then the cookies will not spread thin enough while baking.
- Refrigerate the dough for a about 15 to 20 minutes to make it easier to handle, if necessary. Scoop the dough by tablespoonsful and roll into rounds. Flatten slighty and place on parchment lined cookie sheets.
- Bake them at 180C (350F) for about 10 minutes. You need to watch them till they look dry and seem set when touched on the top. You cannot judge browning because of the colour of the chocolate.
- Let them sit for about 5 minutes on the sheet. Then transfer to racks for cooling completely.
- Pipe a largish blob of royal icing or buttercream on the middle of the cookies. Press the chocolate kisses on them so the icing/ frosting spreads a little around the edges of the kisses to form a “hat band”. Let the icing set. Then transfer to an airtight box.
I'm Aparna and My Diverse Kitchen is my ovo-lacto vegetarian food blog where you'll find recipes, food stories & photography. I've been blogging since 2007 and believe the kitchen, and the dining table (by extension) is really the heart of a home. 
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