Halloween cookies with Royal icing

Cut the room-temperature butter into cubes. It's ready when you can press a small dent into it with your finger. Add the sugar, salt and vanilla and beat everything with the hand mixer for two to three minutes, until the mixture is pale 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 mix, the more tender your biscuits will be.

Press the dough together briefly. For dark biscuits, such as tombstones, knead the cocoa into one portion of the dough. Flatten the dough, wrap it in cling film and chill it in the fridge for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 190 °C convection heat. Roll out the dough to 5 mm thick on a little flour. Place 5 mm rolling guides on the left and right, so the dough is the same thickness everywhere and all the cookies bake evenly.

Cut out 14 Halloween cookies, for example pumpkins, bats, coffins, gravestones and spiderwebs, and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake them for 12 minutes at 190 °C convection heat and let them cool completely before you start decorating.

Add the lemon juice to the egg white in a clean bowl and sieve the icing sugar over it. Sieving is important: even small lumps will later clog the fine tip of the cornet.

Whisk the mixture with a hand mixer. After two to three minutes, the icing flows from the Whisk in a thick, creamy ribbon: this is the perfect consistency for filling in areas.

Take some of it out for outlines and details, and whisk the rest for about two minutes longer. The icing will then become firmer and suitable for drawing lines. If it is too runny, stir in a little icing sugar; if it is too stiff, add a few drops of lemon juice.

Divide the Royal icing among several small bowls and colour it with Gel color as you like: black for outlines and spiders, orange for pumpkins, violet for bats, green, red and grey. Fill the colours into cornets.

Cut a very small opening at the tip of the cornet and use the firmer icing to pipe the outlines, keeping a little distance from the edge. The outline acts like a small dam: it holds back the more fluid icing later.

Flood the areas inside the outlines with the more fluid icing. Use a needle or a toothpick to spread it into the corners and pop small air bubbles. Drag the needle from the outside inwards through two wet colours to create attractive patterns.

Let the base dry for at least one hour, until it feels firm. Only then paint the details on top with the firmer icing: faces, skeletons, spider webs, "R.I.P." and small spiders. This way the colours will not run into each other.

For best results, let the finished biscuits dry completely overnight.