Halloween cookies with Royal icing

Cut the room-temperature butter into cubes. It is ready when your finger can press a dent into it without resistance. Beat it with the sugar, salt and vanilla for two to three minutes, until the mixture is noticeably lighter: the air beaten in makes the pastry crumbly.

Pour the whisked egg in a thin stream while the mixer is running, otherwise the egg and butter will separate. Mix in the flour only until no dry flour is visible.

Press the dough into a flat disc. For dark biscuits, such as gravestones, work the cocoa into one portion. Wrap the dough in cling film and chill it for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 190 °C fan-assisted. Roll out the dough between 5 mm rolling pin guides. The thickness matters here: thinner cookies bend under the icing and break when decorated.

Cut out 14 cookies, for example pumpkins, bats, coffins, gravestones and spider webs, and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake them for 12 minutes at 190 °C fan-assisted and let them cool completely. The icing will run off warm cookies.

Put the lemon juice with the egg white in a grease-free bowl and sieve the icing sugar over it. Fat stops the icing from setting, and lumps of sugar later block the fine tip of the cornet.

Whisk the mixture with a hand mixer. After two to three minutes it flows from the whisk in a thick, creamy ribbon: this is the consistency for filling the areas.

Take off a portion for the outlines and whisk it for about two minutes more, until it becomes firm. This is what you use to draw lines and details. You can correct it at any time: add icing sugar to make it firmer, or a few drops of lemon juice to make it more liquid.

Divide the icing among several small bowls and colour it with gel colour: black for outlines, and orange, purple, green, red and grey for the areas. Gel colour is concentrated and barely thins the icing. Fill the colours into cornets and cover the bowls, as Royal icing dries quickly in the air.

Cut a very small opening in the tip of the cornet and trace the outlines a little inside the edge. The outline holds back the more liquid icing and gives the motif a clean edge.

Fill the areas with the more liquid icing and spread it with a needle right into the corners. You can also use the needle to pop air bubbles. If you pull it from the outside inwards through two wet colours, a pattern forms. For multi-part motifs, fill one area after another.

Let the areas dry for at least an hour, until they feel firm. Only then paint faces, skeletons, spider webs and lettering on top with the firm icing, so the colours do not run into each other.

The finished biscuits are best left to dry completely overnight.