Melting Maggots

The Thanksgiving maggots were so much fun, and besides I did originally buy the molds with Creepmas in mind, so of course I had to make something maggoty for the holidays.  Since these silicone molds are also rated for baking, I decided to try something new and make molded cookies.

If you don't have maggot molds, I do truly feel sorry for you.  They were only in the stores at Michaels for a short time this October, so hopefully they will be back next year. This is where they used to be on their website. Alternatively you could just roll the dough into maggot shapes and tell people they are maggots.  The power of suggestion is...well, powerful.   Remember The Lost Boys?

When I looked for a molded cookie recipe, I found the one thing they all had in common was not using any leavening agents.  So I decided to use a recipe I was already familiar with, Melting Moments from joyofbaking.com.  Because of the high cornstarch context, they really do melt in your mouth.  One recipe made 40 maggots (approx. 1 tablespoon of dough for each).

I made a few slight additions to the recipe that you could do or not.  I add the zest of one small lime after creaming the butter and sugar.  I added about 1/2 tablespoon (all I had left) of green sugar to the dough towards the end of mixing. And I added one packet of True Lime (crystallized lime) to the powdered sugar.

The zest and True Lime gave the cookies a subtle lime flavor, which is what I was going for. Not everyone around here is as crazy about lime as I am. You could easily double them for more flavor or substitute lime juice for the vanilla extract if you are making them for lime lovers.  The crystallized lime doesn't add any color it's a super pale yellow almost white, but the zest and colored sugar added some nice green interest. Again you could go heavier for more color.

To bake I lightly dusted the molds with cornstarch before filling.  This dough is thick and will need to be pressed into the molds.  I found that I needed to add a couple minutes to my bake and cooling time for them to easily pop out of the molds.  Normally baking the cookies on a pan takes 10 minutes, in the molds 12 minutes was perfect. It also helped to let them cool 10 minutes in the molds instead of the usual 5 minutes.

They looked lovely right out of the molds, but the powered sugar is really an important part of these cookies.  Unfortunately the powdered sugar covered up their lovely color and some of mold details. I brushed away any excessive sugar build up with a decorating brush.

Overall they still look quite maggoty and they melt in your mouth, so mission accomplished.

To see what others are doing for Creepmas, head over to  Creepmas.com.