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I absolutely love this time of year, especially when it comes to spending some fun time in the kitchen with my boys. They love to help me bake and were so excited to make these Jack O’Lantern Sugar Cookies! These are perfect for a cool fall afternoon because it involves carving, baking, and a little bit of decorating.
The secret to these sugar cookies is yellow hard candy. They give the glow effect to the pumpkins, a different and exciting new way to eat sugar cookies!
You can either use store bought sugar cookie dough, if you’re in a hurry, or whip up your own batch using my this recipe for the Best Sugar Cookies. Either way, you need to add orange food coloring to the dough. If you’re using store bought dough, knead the food coloring in the dough (or whip it in your mixer). You can make them as orange as you’d like!
Once the dough is ready, roll it out and refrigerate it between two sheets of parchment paper for about 20 minutes or so. It makes it easier to cut the shapes out. Then, use a pumpkin cookie cutter and cut out your shapes.
Next, cut out the pumpkin faces using a sharp knife. If the dough becomes too soft, I found that you can refrigerate it again to make it easier to work with. Bake your Jack O’Lanterns for about 8 minutes at the temperature in your cookie dough recipe until the dough is set but not completely cooked through.
Crush up your yellow hard candy in a food processor. Add the candies to the cut out faces in the cookies and bake again for about two minutes until the candy has melted down. My kids were so excited to see the result! The yellow candies glow, especially when you hold them up to light!
To make our cookies cuter, I piped around the edges with green, orange, and black piping gel. Let the gel set before handling them.
Aren’t they fun? These Jack O’Lantern cookies are the perfect treat to have as a centerpiece at a party and would make fun favors too! We are going to make them for our cousins’ Halloween party too. Nothing is better than combining Halloween with a little bit of baking magic, right?
Jack O'Lantern Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 Recipe Sugar Cookie Dough
- Orange Food Coloring
- 1 package yellow hard candy
- Black Orange, and Green Piping Gel
Instructions
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Add orange food coloring to sugar cookie dough. Mix it in or knead until combined.
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Roll out dough and refrigerate between two sheets of parchment paper for 20 minutes.
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Cut out pumpkin shapes using a pumpkin shaped cookie cutter.
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Carve out faces on pumpkins using a sharp knife.
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Bake cookies for about 8 minutes at temperature set in cookie recipe until set but not completely baked through.
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Crush yellow hard candies in food processor until fine.
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Add yellow hard candies to the face features of the cookies that you carved.
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Put back in oven for about 2 minutes until candy is melted.
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Allow to cool completely.
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Pipe details using piping gel and allow to set.
