The shortcrust pastry recipe to cut with molds and quick glaze to make easy and delicious Halloween cookies!
Do we make Halloween cookies? This is the question that rings in the ears of mothers, fathers, grandparents and uncles of the little ones. But it is also a proposal that we can indulge ourselves for have a little fun in these days to live at home to find the right opportunity for scent the house with cookies and exercise a little our skills as pastry chefs. But without suffering. This year, we make Halloween cookies easy, indeed very easy, helping us with small, foolproof tools. Silicone molds, cookie cutter molds of all shapes will help us in the preparation of scary biscuits and biscuits. But before finding everything you need in our gallery above, let's think about the recipe.
The recipe for easy Halloween cookies
To make easy and good Halloween cookies, let's start from the base. Or from the shortcrust pastry recipe: we will prepare a loaf of about one Kg perfect to be cut with Halloween molds!
The ingredients of the classic shortcrust pastry:
500 g 00 flour plus a little, 300 g butter, 200 g granulated sugar, 5 egg yolks, salt, vanilla, lemon
Method:
To prepare a crumbly shortcrust pastry you first need a good amount of butter, at least half the weight of the flour. And then the first phase of processing the dough is very important, in which the flour blends with the butter. Collect the flour and the cubed butter in a bowl; break the butter with your fingertips, soaking the flour until you get a dusty mix of tiny crumbs: fished out from the bottom and proceed by crumbling from bottom to top, without crushing the dough too much. In this way, the fat in the butter will protect the gluten molecules of the flour, preventing them from combining with the moist part, making the dough too elastic and devoid of the characteristic friability. Then add the sugar, a pinch of salt and the herbs (optional and of your choice: the most common are vanilla seeds or vanillin and grated lemon zest). Finally add the egg yolks: dissolve them, then knead by pressing the dough between your fingers until you get a smooth dough. If your hands are very hot, instead of kneading the dough, you can beat it several times with force on the work surface, in order to touch it less: the body heat melts the butter making it difficult to work, which for this reason must be rather quick. Let the dough rest for at least 30 'in the refrigerator: the butter must regain consistency and the dough must lose that minimum of elasticity due to the gluten stress during processing: it will then be easier to spread. Finally, remove the dough from the fridge and let it warm up for a few minutes: if you roll it out immediately, it breaks. Knead it with a rolling pin on a floured surface until a homogeneous layer of about half a centimeter is obtained. Cut them with Halloween molds, place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and cook at 180 ° C for 17-18 '. Remove from the oven and let cool.
How to preserve the shortcrust pastry
A loaf of freshly prepared classic shortcrust pastry hard in the fridge for 24 hours. Instead, it can be kept in the freezer for up to 6 months: before use, transfer it to the fridge for 24 hours, then leave it for about 30 'at room temperature. The thawed shortcrust pastry must be slightly manipulated because the macro-crystals that form in the freezer, returning to room temperature, humidify the dough in an uneven way. Knead the dough to make it homogeneous again, if necessary with a little flour, and let it rest in the refrigerator again, as if it had just been made. The whipped pastry, on the other hand, must be cooked immediately.
The instruments
To prepare the classic pastry can be used simply the hands. If, on the other hand, you work with a mixer, use the leaf hook. To whip the butter of the whipped pastry you need a whisk, preferably electric; if you use the mixer, use the whisk hook. A rolling pin is essential for subsequent processing and a scraper, pastry cutter, brush, spatula, sieve for icing sugar, trays for baking cookies, molds for pies and tartlets, a grid for cooling the cookies are useful.
To decorate
One of the features that make Halloween cookies fun is the decorations. We can get them either by using a ready-made colored sugar paste (orange for pumpkins, white for ghosts, black for creatures of the night) both making a glaze. For the sugar paste, we will roll it out in a thin layer with a rolling pin and we will cut it with the same cookie cutters, overlapping it at the end with the now cold cookies.
To make the icing at home instead, you will need: 250 g of powdered sugar, 40 g of water at room temperature and food coloring. To prepare it, mix the powdered sugar and water in a bowl and stir until the mixture is smooth. Divide it into various bowls according to the colors you want to prepare and add the food coloring until you reach the desired result. Use a pastry bag or syringe with a very small hole to spread the icing over the cookies and decorate. Let it rest so that it coats well and… happy party!