Spider Cookies

As we near Halloween, we look for easy and fun sweets to devour... ok, maybe that's just me. I already had bloody cupcakes, I destroyed some pumpkin cake, and when I came upon this post from Bubblews, I knew I had to make these. Seemed easy enough... chocolate chips = spiders = cool looking (and tasty!) cookies for Halloween.

Looks can be deceiving.

Here's what I did and what I recommend you NOT do:

Take #1 - I first tried with a pre-made package of cookie dough. You know, those packs you can buy that have the dough all cut up for you and you just have to put them on a cookie sheet and stick in the oven? Well, when I took them out of the oven, the chocolate chips were so hard I ended up putting destroying them. Mangling them. I practically put holes in the cookies! "Ok," I thought, "maybe it's just because it's not from scratch." So I ate all the cookies I made and tried again.

Take 1: Pre-made cookie dough = holes

Take #2 - I made a batch of cookies from scratch (I just used the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip cookie bag) and as soon as they were out of the oven, I grabbed my toothpick and tried making legs. Same problem! I ended up swirling the chocolate chip to loosen it up and draw the legs from there but as you can see, it didn't look like the original post AND it took forever just to get one done:

Take 2: Crabs or spiders?

Original cookie in the post. Yeah. Right.

Take #3 - I thought, "Ok, maybe if I make sure there's no cookie dough on top of the chocolate chips and I put two chips together to make for more melted chocolate to work with." Nope, no change. I even considered using a paintbrush instead of a toothpick but the original post specifically says you can use a toothpick.

And then I realized. Whoever originally posted the article... never... even... tried it. Their specific wording states, "It apparently, should turn out like the picture above." It apparently, does not.

I recommend you give this a try and let me know how it goes. Best case scenario? You have awesome looking cookies. Worst case scenario? You have to eat all those cookies you just made (though it sounds like two best case scenarios to me!)

TOTAL COSTS: $2.59

$2.59 for a pack of pre-made packages of cookie dough from Vons

All other ingredients I already had, including toothpicks

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: About 30 minutes

Unless you decide to make 3 or 4 batches, just account for 15 minutes to mix the ingredients and 10-12 minutes in the oven per batch

EASY-PEASY SCALE: 4 out of 5

While it's not hard to take a toothpick to a cookie, it is difficult to make the spiders look realistic. Perhaps the legs should have been longer. Perhaps an up-and-down process is better than left-to-right. Perhaps you really do need to use a small paintbrush instead of a toothpick. In any case, the moral of the story is: don't believe everything you see on the internet.