Homemade Halloween Jammy Dodgers

Trick or Treat! These deliciously light and crisp sandwich cookies are most definitely a Halloween treat. In this easy recipe, homemade Jammy Dodger style cookies switch their trademark red centres for horrifyingly tasty green slime! Use a Tala open tip piping nozzle to cut out the central window for the jam to peep through and play around with different cutters to make skull faces and other spooktacular designs...

When it's not Halloween, use raspberry jam instead of green apricot jam and enjoy homemade Jammy Dodgers all year round!

Makes: 10 sandwich cookies

Ingredients:

50g caster sugar

100g salted butter, softened

120g self-raising flour plus extra for rolling out

30g cornflour

2 tsp semi-skimmed milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

75g (approx) apricot jam

green gel food colouring

icing sugar to dust

Equipment:

Tala baking tray

Baking parchment

Large mixing bowl

Large silicone headed spatula

Tala measuring spoons

Small plate

Rolling pin

Tala circular cutter, 6.5cm diameter

Smaller cutter or piping nozzle

Small sharp knife

Clean, fine tipped paint brush

 METHOD

1. Line a Tala baking tray with baking parchment.
2. Place the sugar and the softened butter in the large mixing bowl and cream together thoroughly.
3. Measure the vanilla extra and milk into the bowl and mix again.
4. Add the flour and cornflour to the bowl - no need to sift - and stir. The mixture will seem impossibly dry at first, but keep mixing until it forms a soft dough. (You can abandon the spatula at this point and mix with your hand instead if you prefer.)
5. Gather the dough into a ball, transfer to a plate and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
6. Roll out the dough on a floured surface and stamp out circle shapes, gathering the dough and repeating the process until all the dough is used up.
7. Place the circles on the lined baking tray leaving a small gap between them in case they spread slightly in the oven (5mm maximum gap).
8. Leave half of the circles intact and use the small cutter to make holes in the rest of the circles. You can stamp a single small circle, or you can make two smaller ones to look like happy smiling skull faces!
9. To make the skull face 'smile' use the rounded edge of the cutter or piping nozzle to imprint an arc in the dough and indent 'teeth' with a small sharp knife.
10. Set the oven to 170 degrees Celsius (338F). Place the baking tray in the fridge to chill while the oven comes up to temperature and then bake for 10 minutes.
11. Remove from the oven and allow the biscuits to cool slightly while you prepare the jam.
12. Pick out any large pieces of apricot and then mix the jam with a small amount of green gel food colour to make very nice green 'slime'.
13. Place a teaspoon of jam on each intact circle, put a circle with a hole in it on top and then position the sandwiched cookie back on the baking tray.
14. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius (302F) and place the cookies back in the oven for a minute, just to slightly melt the jam and stick the cookie together.
15. Allow the cookies to cool. Then, if you are making skull faces, mix a tiny amount of green gel food colour with water and paint the 'smiles' so that they show up a little better.
16. Dust with icing sugar and serve!