Decorated Halloween Sugar Cookies

I looooove watching cookie and cake decorating videos, but over the years I've only made fancy cookies twice: Christmas Cookies & Fall Leaf Cookies.  I decided that all that video watching had to come to fruition and so I made Halloween Cookies:

I bought an inexpensive set of Halloween cookie cutters and decided to cut a few of several different shapes -- in hindsight this made things super complicated.  But, at the time, I thought variety was a great idea!  While my cookies were baking (I used this Martha Stewart recipe), I decided to plot out my icing plan.

That's a lot of colors of icing and a lot of layering -- especially for a super amateur cookie decorator.  But, I like a challenge (and the cookies were already in the oven) so I decided to plow ahead.

These are the problems I ran into along the way and how I solved them:

No black food coloring.  I only own four colors: red, blue, yellow, green.  Well, thank goodness for all those years of mixing paint.  I know how to make all kinds of blacks and settled on a blue black for these cookies.

Not enough piping tips.  I only own 2 small and 2 medium piping tips and my original plan called for 8 colors of icing (most in 2 consistencies -- piping and flooding).  I decided to eliminate some colors and then figured out a strategy for which colors had to go into the piping bags first.  It mostly worked.

I ran out of confectioner's sugar.  I thought 1 lb. would be enough.  Silly me.  So, I went on a grocery run mid-decorating.

I ran out of piping bags.  No problem. The internet told me I could use a Ziploc bag.  And so I did.

Not good at piping.  Well, nothing to fix that but practice and I can see that I was better on the later cookies.  Need to practice starting and stopping more neatly.

Challenges aside, I spent two happy days making these cookies and I love how they turned out!

And the best part about crafting with food...you can eat it!

I had so much fun making these cookies that I'm thinking about buying some more tips and making some more cookies!  Any tips from you experienced cookie decorators out there?

Thanks for stopping by!