Halloween ginger-dead men

Gingerbread biscuits are my all-time favourite for autumn and the festive season. Soft in the centre, crisp on the outside, and perfectly spiced, sugar-sweetened holiday goodness – they’re perfect.

Today I am going to share my gingerbread biscuits recipe with a spooky twist – let me introduce you to my Ginger-Dead Men!

It’s an easy recipe – just traditional gingerbread biscuits topped with glace icing. The only real difference is the icing pattern – it’s your opportunity to get creative with your spookiness to make your favourite monsters, zombies, and even cats.

This is a perfect family activity for Halloween. Baking is great fun and kids enjoy creating their own scary monsters. With this easy Halloween recipe, your party’s sure to be a scream~

Combine 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed with 3 tablespoons of water to create a “flaxseed egg”, and leave to thicken for 5 minutes.

Heat the vegan butter, sugar, golden syrup and black treacle in a saucepan over a low heat, stir gently until the mixture has completely melted. Leave to cool for 5 minutes.

Sift the flour, salt, baking soda and spices into a large mixing bowl.

Pour in the flaxseed egg and syrup mixture, mix until it forms a dough.

Tip the dough out, knead briefly until smooth, then wrap in cling film and leave to chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Whilst you wait, preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan and line two baking trays with parchment paper.

The dough can be quite tricky to work with if you’ve never made gingerbread cookies before.

Firstly, most non-vegan recipes use blocks of butter to make the cookies which has a firm texture that works well. However, in the UK, you can’t find vegan blocks of butter in most supermarkets. Common vegan butter brands like Pure or Vitalite have a much softer texture and form a soft dough. If they are your only choices you may want to cut down to 1 tbsp water in the flax egg mixture, or, like me, use M&S plant-based kitchen sunflower spread which is pretty firm.

If your dough is too dry or starts to crumble, mix in 1 tsp of milk and knead again until the dough is soft.

Personally, I find it very hard to roll out a big piece of dough evenly so I usually divide it into two small balls and work on them one by one.

My other secret to keeping the dough smooth is to roll it out between two sheets of parchment paper first.

Once the dough reaches around 5mm thickness, take off the top layer of parchment paper and roll directly on the dough to even out the surface.

I prefer light and crunchy cookies, so 3-4mm thickness is perfect for me.

Use gingerbread men cutters to cut out a cookie and place it on the baking tray. Make sure you leave a gap between each of them.

With thinner dough like mine, it may be easier to break and remove the side of the dough first to obtain the gingerbread men without breaking the cookie itself.

Cut out as many gingerbread men as you can, then re-roll the trimmings and continue until you’ve used up all the dough.

Bake for 12-14 minutes until golden. You may rotate the baking tray in the middle to ensure all cookies bake evenly.

In a bowl, whisk together all the icing ingredients until smooth. They should form a thick paste as in the picture below.

Transfer the icing into a piping bag and cut a 2-3mm hole on the tip of the piping bag.

Finally, be creative and decorate your ginger-dead men as desired – have fun!

These adorable Halloween Ginger-Dead Men are irresistible for the spookiest night of the year! The best Halloween biscuits to bake with kids and perfect for trick or treaters.

I topped some of the biscuits with the vegan googly eyes I made a couple of days ago. You can check out the recipe here.

Let me know if you try out this recipe. You can leave a comment below, or take a picture and tag it with #k33_kitchen and share it on Instagram! I’d love to see what you come up with. Cheers, hope you enjoy my recipes!