Halloween cookies with chocolate coating

Cut the room-temperature butter into cubes. It's ready when you can press a finger into it with very little resistance. Add sugar, salt and vanilla and beat everything with a hand mixer for two to three minutes, until the mixture is light and airy.

Let the beaten egg run in a thin stream while the mixer is running. Then add the flour: mix only until no dry flour is visible. The less you stir, the more tender your cookies will be.

Press the mixture briefly into a dough and divide it into two halves. Knead the cocoa into one half. Flatten both doughs, wrap them in cling film and refrigerate for about an hour. When cold, the dough is much easier to press cleanly into the mold.

Preheat the oven to 190 °C convection heat. Press the dough into the cavities of the silicone mold until they are completely filled, and smooth it off with the angled spatula. Remove the excess dough at the same time. You need about 95 g of dough for twelve cookies.

You don't need to grease the mold, the butter in the dough is enough.

Place the mold on a baking tray and bake the cookies for 12 minutes at 190 °C convection heat. Let them cool completely in the mold, as they are still soft when warm and break easily. Then carefully press them out of the mold from underneath.

Now the mould gets used once more. Wash it thoroughly and dry it really well, including all the grooves. Even a small drop of water will leave the chocolate blotchy.

Fill the tempered couverture and the melted orange cake icing into piping bags, and pipe about 2 g into each cavity, so only a thin layer. No more, otherwise the chocolate will overflow the edge when you press the cookies in.

We made the skulls white, the pumpkins orange and the spiders dark. For a marbled coating, simply pipe white and dark or milk couverture together into the same cavity.

Place the baked cookies back into their cavities and gently press them onto the chocolate. This way the chocolate settles as a thin, glossy coating around the motif.

Let the chocolate set, in the fridge this takes just a few minutes. Then gently bend the mold apart and release the cookies. Et voilà: your halloween cookies are ready!