Bloodshot Eyeball Cookies

Time for more Halloween fun! These cookies take a basic butter biscuit recipe to a whole new level to create scary bloodshot eyes which burst and spurt out 'blood' when you bite into them. These are perfect for a Halloween party, or even just to impress your friends.

Be careful when spooning on the jam - if you add to little, you will lose the gory blood-spurting effect and if you add to much, the jam will break through the cookie dough in the oven and you won't be able to top with the icing.

This recipe yields around 12 cookies

Ingredients

100g butter

50g sugar

1tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

200g flour

Pinch salt

Strawberry or raspberry jam

Icing sugar

Water

Blue/green/brown and red food colouring

Something round and black – I used raisins which weren’t ideal, but all I had

Recipe

1. Heat the oven to 175C and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. In a bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Whisk the egg in a small bowl and add ¾ of it to the butter mixture, as well as the vanilla extract and mix well. Keep the rest of the whisked egg to one side.

2. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour and salt. Gradually add the flour mixture to the cream mixture and beat until just incorporated.

3. Roll the cookie dough out onto a lightly floured surface so it is around 1cm thick. Cut out as many circles as you can with a cutter about 5cm wide – ideally, cut out an even number of circles. Place the cookies on a baking sheet.

4. Place around 1tbsp of your preferred jam in the middle of half of the cookies. With a small brush, coat the edges of the cookies topped with jam with the remaining egg. Place each empty cookie on top of each filled cookie and press down gently so that they stick together, but no obvious finger marks are visible. Place in the oven for around 20 minutes, until the edges of the cookies just begin to brown. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

5. When cooled, mix icing sugar and water together until you have quite a thick paste. With the back of a spoon cover most of the raised side of the cookie with the white icing. Make sure you leave a tiny bit to one side.

6. To create the iris, add a few drops of blue/green/brown colouring to some icing sugar and a couple of drops of water until you have a dry, thick dough-like substance you can roll. Separate the icing into 6 even balls. Flatten them until you have roughly round circles and stick in the middle of the icing whilst still dry.

Take the item you have chosen to be the pupil, dip the back of it into the white icing you set to one side and stick on the middle of the iris.

7. Dip a toothpick into some red food colouring and decorate the whites of the eyes with wobbly lines to create veins for the bloodshot effect.