Martha Stewart has nothing on me

Halloween is a holiday that gets kind of overlooked in our house. Part of the reason for this is that I am married to Scrooge McScroogey Pants (Yes, that is his legal name on holidays. The man actually told our kids three years ago that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist. For no other reason but that he thinks it's lame to lie about a bunny that brings candy on Easter. I get that. Sort of. But he has been threatened to never see certain parts of my body naked again should he go telling them LIES about a certain someone that DOES come in December. Oh, yes he does. Right down the chimney, reindeer waiting on the roof and everything. Ahem.)

Anyway, we don't do much around here for Halloween. We go trick-or-treating, attend the token church Halloween party, but that's about it. Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with Halloween for one simple reason: The candy. I can't keep my hands off it. And it can't keep itself off my thighs. So Halloween and I don't necessarily see eye to eye.

But the one traditional Halloween thing that I do every year is make these spider web cookies (which unfortunately don't help when it comes to the matter of my magnetic thighs). Nevertheless, they are super easy and look really cool.

Here's what you do:

Take your favorite sugar cookie recipe. And instead of spending hours rolling the dough flat, cutting shapes with cookie cutters, and essentially having flour all over every crevice in your kitchen, make little dough balls and flatten them with your hands. Shhh. Don't tell Martha. It works just as good and takes half the time.

Then mix up the frosting glaze before you bake your cookies. I cannot stress this enough. The cookies will not work if you don't frost them right out of the oven.

For the glaze:

2 3/4 cup powdered sugar

2 tsp. shortening

3 Tbsp. water

1 Tbsp. corn syrup

1/4 tsp. vanilla

Beat all ingredients well. Separate about 3/4 cup of the glaze into another bowl and add desired food coloring. Put the colored glaze into a pastry bag with a small writing tip.

Now, when your cookies are RIGHT out of the oven - and I mean piping hot - take a few off the tray and begin frosting them with the non-colored glaze (I leave the rest on the tray to keep them warm until I frost them). Pipe the colored glaze in a bulls eye like this:

Then take a toothpick (or BBQ skewer in my case) and start in the center of the bulls eye and lightly draw lines going to the edge of the cookie. Repeat all around for spiderweb effect. [Hint: I never put the next batch of cookies in the oven until I have decorated the first. You HAVE to do this when the cookies are warm, otherwise the glaze doesn't melt on the cookies and they will look dumb. Trust me. I learned that the hard way.]

Stick in a few [hopefully lead-free] plastic spiders and VOILA! A Halloween treat. From my heart to yours. Enjoy.