Ghoulish Gravestones

                      
 
For the Ghoulish Gravestone cookies, use the Spooky Sugar Cookies recipe with a gravestone cookie cutter, bake & cool completely, then cover with Royal Icing, but tint the icing gray using a small amount of black food coloring, then add just enough light corn syrup for the icing to level itself when spread, but so it still hardens enough to use food coloring pens for the lettering. Be sure to wait a full day or at least overnight for the royal icing to harden completely before using the food coloring pens. Food coloring pen sets have become available in most large grocery stores with the cake decorating supplies, plus specialty cake decorating stores or online. If you cannot find any, use a fine, soft watercolor brush and normal black food coloring.

You can use any lettering style you like for your gravestone epitaphs, and you can vary your font styles as you wish. If you are overwhelmed by the concept of free-hand lettering, print out your epitaphs from your computer in fonts you like and the layout centered to your preference, then use those as models to draw on the cookies. I say "draw" because elaborate lettering by hand is much more like drawing than writing, since you are placing each line for the end result image, not just writing quickly to get words down.

I hadn't made gravestone cookies in the past since the only cookie cutters I found were the simple upside-down U shape, which I thought too boring, but I found a more elaborate cutter the same year I made my first outside gravestones, so I thought the theme very appropriate! My first year I wanted to be sure the epitaphs were legible so everyone would get the jokes, which they did, and I was going for a simple carved style. The next year I kicked myself because I've been good at free-hand calligraphy since I was 9 years old, so why not go all out with the lettering? I chose a consistent Old English blackletter font style since I liked the look and can do it in my sleep since I've done it free-hand so many years now. Since I hadn't used the "punny" epitaphs for my yard gravestones, I used them on my cookies, using the same 13 epitaphs that made me laugh the most for the entire batch of cookies. The only drawback to making these cookies every year is that in only 4 years my black food coloring pen has already run out of ink!