Simple iced Halloween gingerbread biscuits and cookies

I love gingerbread biscuits, and this Halloween I decided that I'd have a go at some Halloween themed iced gingerbread cookies. I must admit that I'm not very well practised when it comes to icing, so I was quite pleased with the results!

Below is the recipe that I used, it's the best one that I've tried so far. The dry and wet ingredients are in the correct proportions, and the biscuits keep their shape well while cooking.

Ingredients:

450g plain flour

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

115g unsalted butter

5 tbsp golden syrup

150g soft light brown sugar

1 large egg

Royal Icing sugar and water to decorate

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease baking sheets.

Sift the flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl.

Put the butter, golden syrup and brown sugar into a saucepan and heat until the butter has melted.

Stir the wet ingredients in to the dry ingredients, add the egg, then mix to a firm dough.

Roll out the dough and cut out your shapes. For these biscuits, I used a circular cutter (for the spider webs), a gingerbread man (for the skeletons and mummies), and and Easter Egg (for the skulls). Place onto the baking trays.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden brown. 

When the biscuits are cool they can be iced. I used powdered Royal Icing and added enough water to make a thick icing, then I used a piping bag to ice. I came up with four different designs - the mummy and the skeleton use the gingerbread man base, and the spiders web is drawn on a circular biscuit. The sugar skull uses the Easter Egg cutter turned upside down, which I think works really well!

As I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to icing, I kept the designs very simple. The mummies were definitely the easiest, and once I'd got the hang of the spiders webs they weren't too tricky either. The sugar skulls took a bit more practice but I was pleased with them once they were done - I'd like to have another go at them using some different colours of icing!

These would be great to share at a Halloween party or as party favours for guests. 

A whole heap of Halloween themed iced biscuits!