Halloween Fingers

Put 125 g of soft butter and 75 g of icing sugar into a Mixing bowl and mix with the K beater until the mixture is creamy.

Add 30 g of egg. Crack an egg, whisk it lightly with a fork and weigh out 30 g of it. Do not use a whole egg: the cookies would rise too much while baking.

Add 2 tsp of speculoos aroma and 2 pinches of salt and stir for just a few seconds. Instead of speculoos you can also use vanilla or cappuccino.

Add 225 g of flour and stir only as briefly as necessary: the longer you mix, the more the gluten develops and the more the cookies rise while baking. Finally, shape into a ball by hand.

Divide the dough into two halves of about 220 g each and colour one of them with light green Gel color. This gives you pale and green fingers.

Weigh out 12 g portions and roll them into balls. Form each into a strand about 8 cm long, taper one end into a pointed witch finger nail and press the knuckles in with your fingers while you roll the strand in the middle of your hand.

Mark the creases with a knife. Place the fingers on a perforated tray lined with a Silicone mat and put them in the freezer for 30 minutes, so they keep their shape while baking. Preheat the oven to 135 °C fan.

Do exactly the same with the green coloured dough: weigh out 12 g portions, shape into fingers, taper the nail and score the creases. Put the green fingers in the freezer for 30 minutes too, before they go into the oven.

Bake the fingers for 20 minutes in the middle of the preheated oven at 135 °C fan and then let them cool to room temperature before you decorate them.

Mix 150 g egg-white icing powder with 19 g water on the lowest setting. No faster: we don't want a Meringue, but a firm egg-white icing, which is the base for the Royal icing.

Divide the icing between three Bowls and color it violet, black and orange, the Halloween colors. Other colors work too, of course.

Add water drop by drop, ideally with an icing bottle. The icing should flow in a thread: glossy, running off evenly, but not watery. It leaves a trace when it drips onto the bottom of the Bowl. How much water you need depends on the color, the warmth and the humidity.

Insert the adapter into the Piping bag, cut off the tip and screw on a 1.5 mm Round piping nozzle. Fill one bag per color and close it with a rubber band. The 1.5 mm Round piping nozzle is the easiest for these decorations; at 1 mm the icing dries out inside too quickly.

Draw nails, rings and details onto the cooled fingers. Cover the nozzle tips with a damp cloth in between so the icing doesn't dry out, so you don't have to keep poking them clear with a toothpick.

For the bloody effect, add red iridescent icing, then Sprinkle decor «Halloween» and nonpareils. Purple nails with Glitter, orange nails with sugar decorations, a ring of sugar bones: here you may go over the top.