Hocus Pocus Spellbook Cookies

Halloween isn’t all about blood and gore for me. One of my favorite Halloween movies is…

Hocus Pocus!

I had this movie on VHS as a kid and watched it more times than I can remember. Oh, and I might have had a crush on Thackery Binx. When I watch it now, I’m not sure what I saw in him.

I think it was the accent…possibly the flowy white top…more likely that he was a cat for most of the movie. Who can really decipher the love interests of a young girl? And, while I had some love for Thackery Binx, my heart always belonged to JTT.

Flowers – for me? Oh, JTT, you shouldn’t have.

Anyway, one of the creepiest elements of this not-so-scary movie is Winifred’s spellbook. It is bound with human flesh and has a living eye. Ewww…

It was super fun to make into a cookie – I’ll show you how!

Hocus Pocus Spellbook Cookies

Ingredients:

• Rectangle sugar cookies
• Brown icing, stiff outline and flood
• Gray icing, stiff outline and flood
• White icing, 15 second consistency
• Blue icing, 15 second consistency
• Black icing, 15 second consistency
• Silver luster dust
• Vodka
• Small paintbrush
• Food writer, optional
• Pastry bags, couplers, #1, #2, #4, and #102 tips (you may use a smaller or larger ruffle tip, depending on the size of your cookie. My cookies were 4 1/2 inches long.)

1. Start by drawing the “seam” lines on the book with a food writer (you can skip this step if you just want to wing it). Using stiff brown icing with a #4 tip, draw two sets of lines over the seams so that there is a little dimple between the lines. This will make it look more like a seam, especially once the stitches are in place.

2. Using a #102 tip with the stiff brown icing, make ruffles in some of the open areas of the book to simulate cracks and ridges. To do this, gently lay the tip onto the cookie, larger side down. Make a squiggly ruffle. Repeat until satisfied.

3. Using a #2 tip with the stiff brown icing, outline the entire cookie. You can really do any of the last 3 steps in the order you prefer.

4. Flood the cookie with the brown flood icing. Use a toothpick to push icing into corners, especially around the ridges. Allow to dry for 30 minutes to one hour.

5. Using the stiff brown icing and a #1 tip, add the stitches around the seams.

6. Using the stiff gray icing and a #2 tip, add the rectangle along the spine and the round metal part that surrounds the eye. Immediately flood with gray icing.

Allow to dry for about 5-10 minutes before using a toothpick to create ridges in metal part around the eye. Allow to dry for about 30 minutes.

7. Using the stiff gray icing and a #4 tip, add the snake details. I made the snake heads first by piping a dot about the right size of the head and then using a toothpick to coax the icing to a little bit of a point (the snake’s nose/mouth). The bodies of the snakes were piped with the #4 tip. For the corner snakes, I piped the bodies in stages, since they are tangled together.

8. Using the 15 second white icing, pipe a large white dot for the eye with the #4 tip. Immediately, pipe the blue icing directly onto the center of the white dot, then immediately pipe a little bit of black icing onto the center of the blue.

Feel free to practice this before actually doing it on your cookie! It sounds complicated at first, but it is actually quite easy once you get the hang of it.

9. Once the gray icing has completely dried, mix the silver luster dust with vodka and paint it onto the gray parts of the book.