I’ve seen these gross finger cookies all over the Internet this Halloween season and decided to do my own take, in tribute to Helen Ellis’s “Women and Zombies” in Dead Ends.

If there’s “no time for hair dye in the zombie apocalypse,” there’s certainly no time for manicures, either.

 

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

5 tablespoons granulated sugar

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon almond extract

½ cup softened butter

2 large eggs

1 pinch salt

 

About 40 slivered almonds

Red food coloring

Green food coloring

 

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Separate 1 egg and set aside the egg white – this will be used as an egg wash later. In a medium bowl, whisk together the yolk from this egg with your other egg (yolk and white) with ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract and ¼ teaspoon almond extract.

In the bowl of an electronic mixer (if you have patience, you can do this by hand like I did), cream ½ cup butter with ½ cup confectioners’ sugar, 5 tablespoons granulated sugar, and a pinch of salt. Beat on medium speed until combined. Add egg mixture and beat until smooth and creamy. Gradually add 1 2/3 cups flour until dough is silky smooth. Add a drop or two of green food coloring. I tried to achieve a putrid shade of green, which only needed two drops. Mix until you achieve the color you want. It’s okay if the dough is spotty – zombie skin isn’t supposed to be perfect.

Wrap your dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes. The dough is very soft and needs to be cold to shape the fingers.

In the mean time, delicately mix red food coloring with your slivered almonds to achieve a bloody look.

When your dough is cold, pinch off small bits and shape into fingers. Keep the dough you are not working with in the refrigerator while you shape some of the cookies so that it will stay cold.  In the oven, the dough will expand a little, so shape the fingers thinner than you want them to be.

Carefully score the knuckles with a paring knife and press an almond into the fingertip. Brush the fingers with the egg wash and place on parchment paper-lined baking sheets.

Bake for about 8 minutes, or until the edges start to brown. For my oven, 8 minutes was the perfect timing.

Let the cookies cool on wire racks. Once cooled, dip the ends of them in red food coloring to make it look like they’ve been severed.