Halloween Series...Day 23 Spook-Tacular 3D Haunted Cookie-House

Loren of The Baking Sheet

What a better way to end this week with my dear blogger friend Loren of The Baking Sheet Blog showing you a step by step tutorial of a 3D Haunted Cookie House.
Loren is a master baker and cookie decorator, I love all her cookie creations and her gift box cakes are super cute. Earlier this year three of Lauren's sweet creations were selected to be published in a new book titled "1000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cookies & Cakes"! The books is out already,you can order it here! I'm so honored to have Lauren as my guest today.

This is Lauren...

Hello Fellow Bakers, Cakers and Cookiers!

I'm so flattered to be invited to participate in Kathia's "28 Days of Sweet Halloween Ideas" series! I'm not worthy!! I'm not worthy!! All of the projects have been OUTSTANDING and I'm honored to be among so many talented cake and cookie artists!

My name is Loren and I'm a wife and stay-at-home mom from Long Island, NY. I'm a also a self-taught, amateur cookie and cake decorator. For today's post I decided to make a "Spook-Tacular 3D Haunted Cookie-House" and provide you all with a step by step "how-to" guide! Here is the finished product:

To make the cookies I used a basic sugar cookie recipe and a set of cutters from Williams Sonoma. These cute little cutters come with notches in the house and bases so you can stand the house up horizontally. But don't worry if you don't have these cutters! You can use any house shaped cookie cutter and you can make your own notches --just cut them free-hand with a knife or use a small "#1" or "I" cutter. Anything with a long, rectangle shape will work! For the bases you can use a standard rectangle cutter or circle cutter, just cut it in half! You see, you can make any cookie into a 3D cookie!

1. Roll your dough to 1/4" thick and cut out your shapes.

2. Once your cookies are baked and cooled, assemble the house with the bases to ensure they fit together. You may have to trim the notches so they will assemble easily.

Don’t forget to allow room for your royal icing.

3. Prepare your royal icing. You will need orange, white, black, purple and green!

4. For the roof top you will need to make shingles. I used light purple colored fondant. You will also need a small round cutter (I used the wide end of a piping tip #4B) and a triangle cutter.

5. Next I rolled out my fondant to 1/8” thick and cut out 40 circles.

6. I then used the triangle cutter to cut out the top part of the circle to create somewhat of a candy corn shape

7. Prepare 40 “candy corns” and set them on waxed paper to harden.

8. Next, using the white royal icing, pipe a bunch of spider webs on waxed paper. Once these become hard they can be peeled from the waxed paper. They are fragile, so make plenty of extras just in case they break! I made some small ones and some larger once because I wasn’t sure which size would look proportionate. I ended up using the smaller ones which were approximately 1” x 1”.

9. Next, using the black and purple royal icings, pipe (#2 tip) your windows, shutters and door outlines.

10. Then fill them in with thinned royal icing.

11. Once the royal icing is dry you can add your shingles. Some of them I trimmed to fit around the windows. Start at the bottom of the roof and work your way up, layering the shingles on top of each other. I used black royal icing as glue. I also outlined the windows and added some dots for details. Don’t forget the silver dragees for door knobs!

12. Next came the pumpkins

13. Next, I affixed my spider webs with royal icing at an angle for an additional 3D effect! I added my spooky spider…complete with sugar pearl eyeballs!