Day of the Dead Sugar Skull Sugar Cookies

The kids loved the cookies I made for Halloween especially the skull cookies.  They were actually quite easy to make so we got together and they decorated their own Day of The Dead Sugar Skull Cookies.

To put these together we used:

• Go-To Cookie Cutter Sugar Cookie recipe
• skull shaped cookie cutter
• Wilton icing decoration flowers
• candy corn
• candy coated chocolate balls
• can of  vanilla frosting (you can make your own icing if you want)
• squeeze bottles

After cutting out and baking our cookies we let them cool and set up our decoration station at the dining room table. We put the decorations in bowls and set them on the table with a placemat for each kid.

I put a few spoonful of frosting in each bottle. I had picked up some squeeze bottles so they wouldn’t have to use piping bags. This way, they could draw on the cookies and I was less likely to have to clean up frosting off of the floor/table/ceiling

The kids took their baked, cooled off cookies and planned out what items go where before they used the frosting to glue the items down. Just a little dab of frosting is all you need to make them stick on. Start off with just the candy corn nose and either flower or chocolate candy eyes, and then I let them get a silly.

After attaching the eyes and nose, each skull got their own frosting mouth and some extra frosting and candy decorating. The squeeze bottles worked out perfect.  I’m not kidding when I say they are easy to make. It’s okay if the dough doesn’t look perfectly smooth. Those aren’t cracks; they’re skull fractures.  Skull fractures add character.

We ended up with vampire skulls, skulls with flower crowns, skulls with part hats, and a whole assortment of silliness. You could really use any kind of candy or cake decoration. Get creative. This was what I had on hand but I could have easily used M&Ms or some other leftover Halloween candy.

If you are looking for a kid friendly cookie decoration idea I would recommend this. My only warning: there was leftover frosting galore, but that’s fine by me. Even after all the extra swirls and dots I used less than 1/3 of a container of frosting.  Looks like I’m going to have to bake something else and use that frosting up. Oh no!