Start with the easy Halloween treats and work your way up to the fussy ones. Halloween cookies are some of our favorites to make, from spooky and scary to colorful and adorable. Make these creative bats, pumpkins, ghosts, spiders, witches, monsters and mummies and put together the most awesome tray of cookies ever. There are Halloween cookie ideas here for people who pipe like professionals and easy Halloween snacks for the rest of us. Complete with step by step tutorials, some of these easy cookie recipes can be made at the last minute.
Don’t spend all your time making Halloween food, though. You still want to have time for making spooky decor for your house or big costume bash. Get your home ready for Halloween with our easy DIY Halloween decorations.
Be sure to save some time to create the perfect outfit from our list of DIY Halloween costume ideas and of course, you want the best Halloween makeup tutorials, too. Need some fun costume ideas for couples then try these: DIY Halloween Costumes for Couples. If you’ve waited until the last minute, never fear. We have some of the funniest, cutest and easiest ideas with our Last Minute DIY Halloween Costumes
Happy Halloween!
Easy Halloween Treats for Your Cookie Tray
Try all of them with these easy but super creative cookie ideas for Halloween, complete with recipes and step by step tutorials for decorating.
1. Spooky Bat Sugar Cookies
For a fun Halloween cookie idea that kids and adults love, make these adorable bat sugar cookies. A big fan of sugar cookies myself, I have to say that this Halloween cookie recipe is fantastic. I actually decorated mine with chocolate frosting instead of black food coloring, so if you want to decorate cookies without using food color, you can still make these cute bat cookies. Perfect for Halloween cookies to take to the kids school or bake sale, these simple cookies are fun for all to help make.
2. Chocolate Chip Spider Cookies
I love how this one skips fancy Halloween baking and just dresses up an already-great chocolate chip cookie recipe. The dough doesn’t get scooped into rounds, it gets pressed into cake pans, so you end up with one big jumbo cookie instead of a dozen little ones. Once it’s cooled, you draw crisscrossing lines of white icing across the top like a star, then connect them with scalloped circles to make the web. A black candy melt disk becomes the spider’s body, and you can press the candy eyes on while the icing’s still wet so they don’t slide off. It’s a fun one to hand off to kids since there’s no rolling or cutting involved, just icing and candy. Get the full recipe from The Gracious Wife.
3. Chocolate Pumpkin Cut Out Cookies
Your gingerbread man cutter has an October job and this is it. The dough is a chocolate cut out spiked with pumpkin pie spice and melted 60% cacao chips, so the kitchen smells like fall before the first tray even goes in. Roll it between two sheets of wax paper instead of flouring the counter, which keeps you from working extra flour into the dough and drying it out. These bake hot and fast, 400 degrees for 7 to 9 minutes, just until the edges feel firm. The mummy part is royal icing piped back and forth on a diagonal for the bandages, with two eyes stuck on wherever they look funniest. Diane at Created by Diane makes batches of these every October, and one batch gives you about 36 mummies.
4. Happy Little Ghost Sugar Cookies
That little ghost shape comes from a mini tulip cookie cutter, which is the kind of shortcut I file away immediately. Sarah uses one royal icing consistency, an 8 second icing, for both the outline and the flood, which cuts your decorating time roughly in half. The drying is what you can’t rush: the icing needs a full 24 hours to set before you draw the faces, because a marker on soft icing sinks in and smears. Once it’s truly dry, a black edible food marker gives you as many happy little expressions as you want, and no two ghosts come out the same. These are about as beginner friendly as decorated Halloween cookies get. Sarah’s Bake Studio has the step by step, the timing and the cutter she used.
5. Chocolate Halloween Cookies with Royal Icing
These Halloween cookies are chocolate sugar cookies underneath, so if you like a brownie-ish bite under all that icing this is the recipe to grab. Roll the dough out and chill it flat first rather than chilling the whole ball, since cold dough just cracks when you try to roll it later. Dust your counter with cocoa powder instead of flour so the sticky dough doesn’t grab. You get a choice of royal icing or a faster glaze icing, so leave the ghosts plain white or tint everything witchy green and pumpkin orange. Sally calls the whole process beginner friendly, and looking at her finished tray of bats and jack-o-lanterns, I believe her. Sally’s Baking has the full recipe and icing video.
6. Halloween Grim Reaper Cookies
Nobody looks at a gnome cookie cutter and sees the grim reaper, so I have to hand it to Mike for this one. He cuts the girl gnome shape, trims the hat off at an angle with a knife before baking, and it reads as a hooded cloak. The face gets painted before it gets flooded, black icing brushed inside the hood with a food-only paintbrush, then the purple cloak piped and filled in around it. That base needs an hour or two to crust over before the sleeves go on, and the white skull and the skeleton hands need six hours or overnight to dry hard. Leave the food marker details, nostrils and teeth, for the very end. This one takes patience more than talent, and Semi Sweet Designs breaks it into six steps.
7. Gooey Monster Eye Cookies
These aren’t your average cookie, they’re a meringue, whipped from egg whites and cream of tartar until it holds stiff peaks. A few drops of green food coloring turn the mixture properly slimy looking before it gets piped into little dollops stacked on top of each other. They bake low and slow, about an hour and a half in a cool oven, which is what keeps that light, crisp meringue texture instead of turning them into regular cookies. Once they’ve cooled, you dab on candy eyes with a bit of melted chocolate and they instantly look like tiny monsters. My kids would go nuts stacking these into piles on a dessert table. Kids Craft Room walks you through the whole process.
8. Easy Frankenstein Cookies
Here’s the real lesson in this tutorial and it has almost nothing to do with Frankenstein: go look at your cookie cutters again. Lisa used a basket cutter for his head, and she points out that a purse, a cupcake, a flip flop or a plain square will do the same job. Shop your own drawer before you buy anything. From there it’s green icing outlined and flooded with a #2 tip, a green oval nose and royal icing eyes glued on with a dot of icing once the green has dried. The hair is black icing, and the mouth and stitches get painted on with black food gel thinned with a drop of water, or drawn with a food safe marker if painting makes you nervous. The Bearfoot Baker has the airbrush version too.
9. Chocolate Monster Cookies
Two chocolate chip cookies, a thick pipe of ganache and a marshmallow cut into teeth. That’s a monster. What makes it work is pressing the top cookie down on one side only, so the mouth stays open and the whole thing looks mid-yell. The chocolate chip cookies people ask me to make have cut up candy bars in them, so I’m not about to argue with a Halloween cookie that’s mostly an excuse for more chocolate. Krissy makes homemade googly eyes for hers too, which is worth planning around since they need a full day to dry, and she’ll tell you the store bought shortcut doesn’t have the same character. Self Proclaimed Foodie has the ganache, the eyes and the cookie recipe linked together in one place.
10. Poison Apple Sugar Cookies
The poison apple from Snow White turns out to be a natural as a sugar cookie. The base is an apple shape flooded in red royal icing, and it has to be bone dry before the green goes on. The skull goes on in a single pass with no outline, dry, then fill: draw the two eye circles, outline the drips where you want them and fill it all in right away so it settles smooth. A black stem and leaf make it look properly cursed, and a little gold shimmer painted onto the dry leaf takes it from cute to storybook. Angelica used a projector to place the skull but says it’s essentially freehand, so a steady hand and a photo on your phone will do. Angelica Made Me has the exact shimmer she used.
11. Witch Finger Cookies
This one swaps the melted-witch-puddle gag for actual finger-shaped cookies, and I think it’s even more fun to make. You roll the green dough into long finger shapes, press a blanched almond into the tip for a nail, then use a toothpick to press in creases where the knuckles would be. Once they’re baked and cooled, you pop the almond back off, dab red gel underneath, then press it back down so the color oozes out around the edge like it’s bleeding. You can do the same at the other end for extra gore, or leave them plain since they’re plenty creepy already. My family always fights over who gets to press the toothpick lines in. Six Sisters’ Stuff has the full recipe, blanched almonds and all.
12. Salted Caramel Stuffed Chocolate Cookies
Not every Halloween cookie recipe needs a face on it. This is a soft chocolate cookie with a whole caramel sealed inside, which I’d argue still counts as spooky, since nobody knows it’s in there until they bite. You roll a caramel into a ball, sandwich it between two tablespoon sized balls of dough and pinch the dough shut around it. Give them two or three inches of room on the pan, since some caramels spread more than others, and pull them at 8 to 10 minutes when the edges are set and the centers only just look baked. The sea salt on top is listed as optional and I wouldn’t skip it. Lindsay at Life, Love and Sugar tested her way to Werther’s as the best store bought caramel, which saves you the experiment.
13. Halloween Sprinkle Cookies
Black cocoa is the whole trick here. Olivia blends it with regular Dutch processed cocoa to get a cookie that bakes up nearly black instead of brown, and she says it tastes like an Oreo, only softer and chewier. The dough chills for at least an hour before you scoop it, so start it the night before a party. The white coating is candy melts rather than white chocolate, on purpose, because white chocolate is really more of a yellow and would kill the contrast. Keep the bowl over the double boiler while you dip so the coating stays thin, then give it a moment to set before the sprinkles go on, since hers took longer to firm up than she expected. Liv for Cake has the cocoa amounts and the candy melt method.
14. Dark Chocolate Halloween Chip Cookies
If piping icing isn’t your idea of a good time, this is your Halloween cookie. Amy uses Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa to get a dough that’s almost black, then loads it with orange and black Halloween baking chips, white chocolate chips, peanut butter chips and mini Reese’s Pieces. The move worth stealing: hold back a handful of those chips and press them into the tops of the cookies the second they come out of the oven. She calls it a vanity move and she’s right, and it also makes them look like you bought them somewhere expensive. The dough is very soft, so if it’s fighting you, chill it for half an hour before scooping. House of Nash Eats notes that Yummallo makes the Halloween chips now that Nestle has stopped.
15. Mummy Cookies
Don’t let the long ingredient lists on other mummy treats scare you off, this version only needs four things: refrigerated sugar cookie dough, canned white frosting, powdered sugar and candy eyes. You slice the dough into rounds, push a lollipop stick into each one, and they bake up as sturdy little cookie pops. Once they’ve cooled, pipe the frosting on in horizontal rows that overlap slightly so it reads as bandages, tucking the candy eyes under the second row so they peek out. It sets in about fifteen minutes, though it’s smart to make these earlier in the day before a party. My kids can usually help decorate these without much supervision. Amanda’s Cookin’ has the full how-to, from slicing the dough to piping the bandages.
16. Potion Bottle Cookies
Callye trimmed a sundae cutter into a potion bottle for an Alice in Wonderland platter, and it works just as well as a witch’s brew. A beaker, a baby rattle, a skull or a hot air balloon cutter will get you the same shape. The bottle is outlined in white and filled with blue, leaving a gap for the green, and the label goes on in 20 second icing once that’s set. Then comes the antiquing, the honest part of this tutorial: she says it took three tries and some help from cookie friends before it looked right. Her tips are to dab the wet brush on a paper towel first, paint in a swirly motion instead of strokes and use ivory gel rather than brown. Sweet Sugarbelle links the video she learned it from.
17. Blood Spatter Cookies
This is the messiest recipe on this whole list and honestly that’s the best part. The cookies themselves are a rich chocolate dough with cocoa powder and corn syrup mixed in, scooped and baked into disks. The real trick is the icing: egg whites, cream of tartar and powdered sugar whipped into a soft peak, tinted red, then thinned with water until it drips off a spoon. You dip a fork in and fling it at the cookies to get that splatter look, which is a good excuse to make a mess in the kitchen. If you’d rather keep things tidy, a squeeze bottle gets a similar effect without any flinging. The Soccer Mom Blog has the exact icing ratios so yours won’t turn out too runny.
18. Witch Hat Cookies
No oven, no dough, no mixer. These witch hats are a round cracker dipped in melted chocolate with a Hershey’s Kiss on top, and they’re some of the easiest no bake Halloween cookies here. The icing is nothing but powdered sugar, water and food coloring mixed stiff, and you only need about a quarter teaspoon per hat. Press the kiss down into that dollop and the icing squeezes out into a neat ring around the base, which is the entire design. Unwrap every kiss before you start, because peeling foil one at a time while your chocolate sets is a special kind of frustrating. Kristin suggests peanut butter or caramel filled kisses for a surprise inside, and Dizzy Busy and Hungry has the microwave timings for the chocolate.
19. Mummy Meringue Cookies
Egg whites, powdered sugar and two candy eyes turn into a mummy, which still strikes me as a magic trick. Meringue is only fussy in two places, and if you respect both, the rest is easy. First, the bowl and the beaters have to be completely grease free, glass or stainless rather than plastic, and not one speck of yolk can sneak in with the whites or they won’t whip. Second, they bake low and slow at 200 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes, then you turn the oven off and leave them in to cool, which is what keeps them from cracking. The piping is a simple zigzag with a round tip, so the bandages hide any wobble. Shinee’s recipe makes 30 and they stay crisp for up to a month in an airtight container.
20. Chocolate Peppermint Cut Out Cookies
There is a gingerbread man hiding inside every one of these ghosts. Diane cut them with a gingerbread boy cutter, iced them white and gave them faces, which is the kind of cookie cutter reuse I fully support. The dough is chocolate and peppermint, built on the York Peppermint Patty flavor combination, with melted chocolate and Dutch process cocoa in a brown sugar base. It bakes hot and fast at 400 degrees for 7 to 9 minutes, so watch for the edges to firm up instead of waiting on color. A dark cookie will never tell you it’s done by looking browner. Roll it a quarter inch thick between two sheets of wax paper and the dough won’t fight you. Created by Diane keeps this one for Christmas too, cut as snowflakes with pink icing.
21. Slime Ball Hi Hat Halloween Cookies
The tall marshmallow cap is what makes a hi hat cookie, and it is the part that scares people off. Underneath is a soft, cakey chocolate cookie baked at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes and pulled while the center still gives. The cap is homemade marshmallow frosting whipped to stiff peaks for a full 12 to 16 minutes, which is not a typo and is why a stand mixer earns its counter space. You pipe it into a two-inch cone, chill the cookies, then dip each one upside down in melted green candy melts. Mini chocolate chips become the eyes. Work in small batches and refrigerate as you go, because a warm cap slides right off into the coating. Sugar Dish Me shows how to pipe it, which she says is the trickiest part.
22. Jack Skellington OREO Cookies
The face goes on last, drawn straight onto set white chocolate with an edible marker, so the coating underneath has to be smooth and hard. Melt the white candy melts in 30 second bursts, stir them silky, then dip Halloween Oreos one at a time on a fork, tapping the fork on the rim to shed the drips. Keep plenty of melted chocolate in the bowl or the tops won’t set smooth. Freeze them solid, wipe off any condensation with a cloth towel, then draw, wiping the marker tip between cookies or the lines go fuzzy. If your marker has dried out, and Anjali’s had, dip the tip in gel color thinned with a drop of water for two or three minutes. No oven at any point, and one of hers has little red hearts for eyes. RecipeMagik has the recipe.
23. Nutter Butter Mummies
I always forget how few ingredients some of the best Halloween treats need until I come across one like this. It’s just Nutter Butters, white chocolate melting wafers and candy eyes, no baking required at all. You dip each cookie in melted chocolate with a fork, let the excess drip off, then drizzle more chocolate back and forth over the top so it looks like mummy wrapping. Press the candy eyes on while that drizzle is still wet so they stick, then let everything set for a few minutes before serving. One tip from the recipe that I’d actually use: trim the hardened edges with kitchen shears once they’ve set for a cleaner look. I Heart Naptime has the full three-ingredient recipe and step photos.
24. Halloween Candy Bucket Cookies
Here is the cookie decorating trick worth stealing even if you never make this one: trace around the bottom of your cutter with a food safe marker before icing and you have a map. Uniform cookies, no projector needed. The cutter is a candy corn turned on its head into a trick or treat bucket, which I did not see coming. Outline and flood in orange, drop yellow dots into opposite corners while that icing is wet, then let the base dry completely before stenciling on the jack o’lantern face. The candy spilling over the top is white 20-second icing with neon quins scattered on while it’s wet. The black handle is piped on with a #3 tip and left to dry. Sweet Sugar Belle’s tutorial explains why the candy corn cutter beat the skull she’d planned.
25. One Eyed Monster Cookies
Thirty minutes start to finish, and ten of those are just baking. That makes this the Halloween cookie to remember at nine at night when you find out the class party is tomorrow. It starts with a box of sugar cookie mix rolled into two to three inch balls and flattened with the bottom of a drinking glass, which gives you a rounder cookie than your palm ever will. Purple Funfetti frosting goes on next, with the sprinkles pushed out to the edge so the middle stays clear. The monster is a sour gummy octopus, stuck down with a dab of melted candy melts instead of frosting, because candy melts set hard and frosting doesn’t. One candy eyeball on top and you’re finished. Smart School House has the shopping list, and it’s short.
26. Monster Cookie Bar
Sometimes you don’t want individual cookies, you want a big pan of something you can just cut into squares, and that’s exactly what these are. The base is a peanut butter and oat batter loaded with M&Ms, chocolate chips and peanut butter chips, so every bite has something different in it. It all gets pressed into one sheet pan and baked together instead of scooped one at a time, which is faster if you’re feeding a crowd. Lining the pan with parchment first is the one tip worth remembering, since it lets you lift the whole batch out to slice instead of cutting it up in the pan. My family would go through a pan of these in a day easily. Yellow Bliss Road’s version bakes up thick and chewy, not gooey in the middle.
27. Halloween Pinwheel Cookies
Black and burgundy is the pair Tammilee used, and it reads as Halloween without a single candy eye in sight. Swap in orange and green, or black and white, and the same dough carries you through any holiday you like. Both colors come out of one batch of sugar cookie dough split in half and tinted with gel, so there’s no second recipe to track. What makes this work is chilling twice: an hour in the fridge for the colored disks, then another hour in the freezer once they’re stacked and rolled into a log. A firm log slices cleanly and a soft one squashes into ovals. Lift the second sheet onto the first with a metal spatula, since colored dough tears if you lift it by hand. Bake at 325 degrees for 13 minutes.
28. Vampire Sugar Cookies
Two thin sugar cookies, a dab of seedless raspberry jelly and two toothpick holes: that is a vampire bite. The clever part is the second cut: build the jelly sandwich, then press the cutter through both layers again, which seals the edges so nothing leaks. Roll the dough between parchment, and don’t take it all the way down on the first pass, because each circle gets rolled thinner again before it’s filled. Poke the teeth marks through the top layer only, never all the way through. There’s nutmeg and sour cream in this dough, which is not what I expect from a Halloween cookie and is very much a good thing. Bake at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes, just until the edges turn gold. Ashlee Marie has the full recipe and a video.
29. Easy Halloween Cookies
These remind me of the soft frosted cookies from the grocery store bakery, except it’s homemade and better. The dough uses cake flour and a little cornstarch along with sour cream, which is what keeps the cookies soft and almost cakey instead of crisp. You scoop, flatten and bake only nine at a time so they have room to spread, then let them cool completely before frosting so the buttercream doesn’t melt into a puddle. Once they’re cooled, spread on orange and purple buttercream and finish with sprinkles for that classic Halloween look. They store fine in an airtight container for a few days if you want to make them ahead. Inside BruCrew Life has the full ingredient list, almond extract included.
30. Halloween M&M Cookies
Browning the butter is the one step here that takes a few extra minutes, but it’s what gives these cookies that deep, nutty flavor instead of a plain sweet one. A little cornstarch mixed into the dough keeps the cookies soft for days. You fold in orange and black M&Ms with the chocolate chips, then the dough has to chill for at least four hours before baking. Skip that step and the cookies won’t hold their shape, they’ll spread thin and flat in the oven. They still might look a bit underdone on top when you pull them out, but that’s normal since the centers keep cooking from residual heat. Averie Cooks calls these Halloween M&M’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, and the browned butter makes the difference.
31. Halloween Pumpkin Cookie Cake
A boxed pumpkin cookie mix does most of the heavy lifting here, and I don’t think anyone at the party will mind. You press the dough into a foil-lined 9-inch round cake pan instead of scooping individual cookies, so it bakes up as one giant soft pumpkin cookie. Once it’s completely cool, tint canned cream cheese frosting black with gel coloring and spread it over the top like you would a real cake. A few drops of coloring go a long way, so it’s worth adding it slowly instead of dumping it all in at once. Finish with Halloween sprinkles and you’ve got a dessert that looks like way more effort than it actually was. Crazy for Crust built this one to be the fast, no-fuss option for a Halloween potluck.
32. Dracula’s Dentures
Most Halloween food looks better than it tastes, which is the exact complaint Christy names before she gets to these. Dracula’s dentures are built on chocolate chip cookies, red frosting and mini marshmallow teeth, so the flavor is settled before you start decorating. Bake the cookies homemade or start with a tube of dough, either way it’s twenty minutes of assembly. Wear gloves unless you want red fingertips all evening, because tinting frosting that dark takes real color. If almonds are off the table at your house, the fangs can be pumpkin seeds or a sliver of white gummy candy. The original placed second in a Nestle baking contest back in 2010, which is a decent sign for something this silly. The Girl Who Ate Everything shows you how to build them step by step.
33. Candy Corn Swirl Cookies
Skip the knife and slice this log with a piece of thread. Slide it underneath, cross the ends over the top and pull, and you get a clean round instead of the flat oval a knife makes of soft dough. It’s the best trick on this whole list and it costs nothing. The cookie is one batch of sugar dough split three ways, two parts tinted orange and yellow and the third left plain, then rolled flat and stacked in candy corn order. Watch the dough as you mix: it should be pliable and not sticky, and another quarter cup of flour fixes it if it is. Bake at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes and pull them when the tops stop looking shiny. Even the guests who won’t touch candy corn will eat these.
34. Peanut Butter Cut Out Cookies
Before pumpkin cookie cutters existed, this recipe used the lid off a one pound coffee can. Five inch circles, a stem carved by hand with a knife and a Halloween tradition that started with a Cleveland newspaper clipping. Then comes the decorating: homemade powdered sugar icing and faces piped on in melted chocolate. Peanut butter cut outs hold an edge as well as sugar cookies do and taste like something you’d actually choose. The place this one goes sideways is the flour, and there are four and a half cups of it. Spoon it into the cup and sweep the top level instead of scooping, or you’ll pack in extra and end up with dry, crumbly dough. The Merchant Baker chills the dough two hours and bakes at 375 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes.
35. Paleo Witch Finger Cookies
I went gluten free about a year ago and I’m still learning that side of baking, so a witch finger that skips wheat flour is useful to me. This one is built on coconut flour and coconut oil, so it’s paleo and dairy free. Use agave in place of the honey and it’s vegan too. The red is homemade strawberry jam rather than gel coloring, so it tastes like something instead of just looking gory. Fair warning if coconut flour is new to you: it drinks up moisture like nothing else in the pantry, so it is never a one for one swap in a recipe written for wheat. This is one of the few Halloween cookies here that suits a gluten free table without an apology. Food Faith Fitness has the full recipe.
