Kitchen Blooper! Jack Skellington Sugar Cookies

Halloween...  One of my favorite holidays.  You have an excuse to dress up, eat tons of candy, and celebrate the darker, spookier side of life.  Being a lifelong fan of "Haunted Mansion" and lover of the weird and spooky, Halloween is my time of year.

When I got the recipe for the Jack Skellington Sugar Cookies, I was over the moon.  I love, love, love "The Nightmare Before Christmas."  I love cookies.  What a perfect match...  It was like Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, like Madame Leota and Tarot Cards, like pumpkins and the headless horseman...  It just seemed to belong so perfectly.  Add to that my recent trip to Disney and seeing these cookies absolutely everywhere, I figured this couldn't be a cooler recipe. 

And then I made them.  Yikes.  The recipe I had?  Not good.  They were bland, they were dry, they just weren't that tasty.  And the sugar frosting?  It was really practically inedible.  Even my son, who I think is in some way related to the Cookie Monster, took one bite and wanted no more.  I can imagine no bigger sin in my son's world then to refuse a cookie, and if this one was worth refusing...  That says something.

Now, to be fair, a lot of the recipes I get are authentic, but they're done in such huge batches that they have to be scaled down by the chefs that give them to me.  After all, I have no real need to do batches of 100 cookies.  Sometimes, when those conversions are made, while technically accurate by proportion, they don't taste quite right.  This recipe was an obvious victim of that phenomenon as, when I made them the second time, I had the very exact same issues: a bland, dry cookie with icing that was gross.  Very un-Disney. 

But at least they looked great.

That all being said, it's not like this recipe is a total loss.  The idea behind it still works...  Just your favorite, trusted sugar cookie recipe (or buy some premade cookies, or premade cookie dough), ice it with white frosting or icing or chocolate, and using a small tipped bag of black decorator gel, and you have your own, edible, Jack Skellington cookies.

But of course, I also made another discovery in this process...  That I don't have the patience to decorate that many cookies.  But that's a problem for a different day.