Bug-eyed bats, scared cats and balloon pumpkins

I can’t help it. Where I live – technically – it’s just a minute or seven past Halloween and I’ve just got to post the one and only set of Halloween cookies I was able to do this year before we’re back to plain pumpkins and leaves through Thanksgiving.

I made these cookies for the Halloween party in my son’s Kindergarten class and for a Halloween open house we hold every year for sugar buzzed trick or treaters and their frazzled parents. Ty said he wanted bats and cats.

So that’s what he got.

But that’s a lot of black icing on the plate, so I intended to add some orange jack-o-lanterns.

Lucky for me, I stumbled upon a picture of pumpkin stencils. The look was exactly what I was seeking:  simple, clean lines, easy.

I used a balloon cutter to mimic the perfectly round stencils and outlined and flooded the balloons in orange with a little orange stem. Immediately thereafter, I used white icing and a Wilton No. 1 tip to eyeball and pipe the designs onto the still wet orange icing (i.e., the wet-on-wet technique). Previously, I have not done much more than pipe dots onto wet icing, so this felt like a revelation of sorts, taking me to new heights. Little known magic-Halloween-balloon-pumpkin-heights.

Also, for the record, everybody liked the bats the best. Cute always wins over clean lines, doesn’t it? I guess that’s why we give the littles double the chocolate.

p.s. That fanatic with the party all over blue and orange hair is actually my better half. The jersey – thankfully just the jersey – is NOT a costume.