Hey Besties! Halloween is just around the corner and for some of you, you’ve had your Halloween cookie designs planned for a while! But for many, this time of year is when MANY just jump into cookie decorating, in anticipation of the holiday season! And if you’ve been here before, you’ll know I’m an advocate for creating beautiful and impactful designs that don’t require 10,000 hours of experience or a master’s degree in pastry arts. If you have those things, fabulous!! But if you don’t and you want to make cute and fun decorated cookies, you’ve come to the right place. We celebrate ALL home bakers here, in all the different skill levels. And no matter how many cookies I decorate, I love a less-is-more approach with simple techniques and styles anyone can learn. So, if you’re looking for some cute, simple, Halloween cookie designs for beginners, let’s do this!
Recipes
Before we can get to the decorating, we need a delicious canvas! If you have a cookie recipe you love, awesome! But if you’re looking for a great one, you can’t go wrong with our no-chill vanilla sugar cookie recipe. Or, if you really want to up your game, you have full access to our entire cutout cookie recipe collection. All no-chill recipes that are incredibly delicious plain or paired with royal icing! You’ll find many fun, seasonal flavors that our family, friends and customers love.
Up next, royal icing! Again, if you have a royal icing recipe you love, stick with it! But if you’re looking for a fabulous royal icing recipe, you can see exactly how we make ours everyday HERE. Not all royal icing recipes are the same, in fact, despite a short list of ingredients, they can yield very different results! The magic is in the method of HOW the icing is made. And if you’re new to the world of cookie decorating, you’ll learn that there can be several royal icing issues that plague cookiers, such as craters, color bleeding and more. I’m happy to report that we don’t experience any of those issues with our icing. Decorating is SO much more fun when you have a reliable recipe that gives you beautiful results every time.
What Do I nEed To Decorate These Cookies?
I know it can be super overwhelming to figure everything out when you start, we’ve all been there! But the good news is that you really don’t need much at all to start decorating cookies! A few things will make your journey a little easier, but you don’t need to make any big investments. I break it all down for you HERE. And once you know you love cookie decorating, you can then consider more tools and products to build on your skills and designs.
Cookie Decorating Techniques
If you’re brand new to decorating cookies with royal icing, you’ll want to focus on your flooding skills first. This will give you the basic fundamentals and teach you so much about working with royal icing. It’s the best place to start and then you can continue to build your skills. Our Flooding 101 tutorial is super helpful in teaching you everything you need to know to expedite your success.
In today’s designs, we’re using very simple, straightforward decorating techniques, such as wet-on-wet and decorating in sections. These are fundamental techniques that you will use forever in your cookie decorating journey.
I want to reiterate that anyone who wants to learn, can make beautiful, impactful cookies and designs. Not everyone aspires to be a master cookie decorator and that is okay! Some of the cutest designs use very simple techniques, but it’s your creativity and style that makes it unique.
Alright, truth bomb: The hardest part of cookie decorating is learning consistencies. If you don’t already know, you use just one royal icing recipe which you thin (with water) or thicken (with powdered sugar) in order to achieve the consistencies you want. Flooding will always be a thinner consistency whereas making flowers will always be stiff to hold the shape of the icing. Everything else you do is basically somewhere in between these. It’s worth a read through this consistency guide which will help it all make more sense and shorten your learning curve.
HalLoween Cookie Designs for Beginners
These are great designs that help you start incorporating some decorating techniques! I made a video walking you through each of these so you can see exactly how they are made, with tips along the way. Keep in mind that the video is sped up, because cookie decorating is actually a SLOW process! Do not try to decorate this fast or it will be a guaranteed disaster. 😂
You can find the video HERE and I hope you like these fun designs! Practicing these techniques will allow you to keep building and expanding your cookie decorating skills. In the meantime, everyone will thank you for the beautiful and delicious cookies!
Keep Learning, Bestie!
I hope this was helpful for you! And if you haven’t already, I hope you subscribe to receive the weekly newsletter below! Never miss out on a new recipe, technique, product recommendation, Featured Baker and free printables! Happy Baking, Bestie!