(upbeat music)
- Happy Halloween, everyone!
I am Jason Barrows with jerryjamesstone.com,
and today we're going to make some fun Halloween cookies,
candy corn cookies, and let's get baking.
(upbeat music)
So our first step, we're going to cream our butter
and our powdered sugar together, we want that to be
nice and fluffy before we add any of the ingredients
to that, so we're gonna put in our butter here.
Slightly softened, want that to be able to
cream very nicely, and our powdered sugar.
(mixer whirring)
All right, so our butter and our powdered sugar
is nicely creamed, and we're going to add the egg
and the vanilla next.
(mixer whirring)
Next, we're gonna add our flour, our salt,
and our baking soda, which has been whisked together
in a bowl together,
so it's nice and mixed throughout,
and we're gonna add that to our butter mixture.
(mixer whirring)
So, now it's time to divide our dough
into three equal pieces.
You can do one of two things here.
You can grab a scale and divide them out evenly
if you want them exact,
or you can just kinda, you know, eyeball it.
What I usually do is start with a piece,
make a ball, make another piece,
just make sure that when you're dividing
your balls of dough that they just more or less
feel like they're about the same size,
you can kind of feel where your fingers overlap
or touch your other hand,
and also just the weight.
They don't have to be exact, just as close as you can,
and again, if you do want it exact,
just pull out your scale and you can do it that way.
So, we're gonna leave one dough white,
and we can just put that off to the side,
and we're gonna make an orange
and we're gonna make a yellow now.
All righty, it's time to mix our orange dough.
When you use food coloring, it can seem a little difficult,
just a couple of pointers.
Since we're mixing colors, we're not just making,
you know, one color, we have to use red
and we have to use yellow to make orange,
I always suggest just doing one drop at a time,
like maybe two drops of red, two drops of yellow,
mix it, see where you're at.
If you add too much of one or you add both at the same time,
you know, you could be spending the next 10 or 15 minutes
trying to fix your color,
so start easy, you can always make it darker.
I always like to use a spatula,
the food coloring will get on your hand and not come off.
Alternatively, you can use some disposable
food grade gloves, knead it with your hands,
whatever you prefer there.
So, I'm just gonna put a couple drops of each
on top of the dough and see what I get.
Okay, I'm gonna mix now.
So, now our doughs have been mixed
and we're ready to assemble.
I've lined a loaf pan with some plastic.
We're first going to start with the white cookie,
we're going to put that on the bottom,
followed by the orange, and on top of that, the yellow.
So, before I put the dough into the loaf pan,
I am just gonna flatten it out a little bit
just to kind of make my life a little bit easier
when I put it in the pan.
It doesn't have to be exactly flat,
but just enough so that you're not putting a round ball
into the pan.
We're just going to put that in there.
You can use your hands, you can use a spatula,
whatever is gonna get the job done for you.
I'm just gonna use my hands real quick.
Now, when you do get it flattened out,
I do like to take the spatula to just make
the surface nice and flat.
You want the line between the layers to be
as flat as possible.
All right, so now we're ready for our orange layer,
and the reason why we lined our pan with plastic
is just for ease of extricating it out of the pan
when it's chilling in the refrigerator.
Otherwise, you really have no way to get it out,
so the plastic is just to make a nice, easy,
malleable way to be able to get that out later.
So, now we're going to take our orange,
flatten it out slightly, and we're just going to
put that right on top, flatten that down.
Make sure that you're getting right into the corners,
and you wanna make sure that it's not like,
rounded at the corner, you really want that corner
to be nicely covered.
Again, I'm gonna go over with my spatula just to make sure
that it's nice and flat.
Okay, and last we've got our yellow.
So, one thing about food dye.
I don't use it often in my recipes.
Sometimes it can actually have an off taste
to an item, so the more bright your color is,
the more dye you're going to add and it actually can impart
bitter flavors into your baked goods.
So, if you're looking for something specific,
just be aware that your dye could actually
potentially change the flavor.
So, you know, just a preference, but bright colors
will mean more dye and that will also change your taste,
so just remember that.
All right, now that you've got all your layers on,
what I like to do with the plastic is I like to fold it
in on itself, just to kind of like,
wrap it up like a present, and then I like to gently
press down on all the layers just to make sure
that all the air bubbles and everything in between
the layers becomes nice and compact
and we're just really getting a nice solid, even brick
inside of our loaf pan.
So, here we go.
So, now this needs to chill for at least four hours.
I would recommend leaving it in overnight
and just cutting them the next day,
you really want this dough to be nice and firm
so that when you cut it, you can get it into the oven
quickly and it still retains its shape,
so again, at least four hours,
I would recommend overnight on this.
So, we're just gonna put this in the fridge,
wait for this to chill, and then we'll go ahead
and cut this up.
Okay, so now that the dough has been chilling
for at least four hours,
again I recommend overnight,
we're going to take that out of the pan,
we're going to unwrap the dough completely
out of the plastic, and then we're going to set that on
a cutting board or cutting surface,
and then we're going to cut width-wise across the dough
in about quarter inch slices,
and then what we're gonna do with our knife
is we're gonna actually cut triangles,
so you're gonna alternate one way,
and cut the other way, back and forth,
until you cut one slab,
and then just continue to cut the rest of the slabs,
and cut across, back and forth in a diagonal.
Then you're gonna put those on sheet pans,
lined with parchment, for six to eight minutes at 350.
You want the cookies to be slightly puffed and the
bottoms to be slightly golden brown.
(magical sound)
So, we're all baked here, we're all ready to go.
Got our cute little candy corn cookies here.
So there we go.
We really hope you like this recipe.
If you have any questions or comments,
please let us know, we'd be happy to answer them for you,
and we'll see you next time, thanks a lot.
(upbeat music)
They're not as difficult as you might think, so...
I'm gonna turn all red!