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If you're already itching to decorate holiday cookies, why wait until Christmas?

Halloween is a great excuse to pick up some creepy cookie cutters and let the kids have fun decorating spooky kitties and ghastly ghosts. It's cheap, easy fun that can double as party food.

While any cookie dough intended for use with cutters would work, gingerbread is ideal because it stays fresh (meaning the cookies can be baked well ahead of a party) and is tough enough to stand up to rough handling by children.

To make the cookies more interesting, these are baked onto lollipop sticks. Children enjoy this novel way of eating a cookie and you get more display options for the party (such as sticking the cookies into a pumpkin).

Because gingerbread is a dark cookie, you will need to use a fair amount of food coloring in the icing to ensure coverage. When making the cookies, bake some dough scraps to use for testing the icing later.

Gel food coloring (available online and at craft and baking stores) works best. Black provides excellent coverage, as does white (though it is essential to add white food coloring to the naturally white icing). Orange may require several coats of icing for good coverage.

This icing recipe is a poured fondant, which is a thick, soft powdered sugar and white chocolate-based icing that can be poured (easiest and smoothest results) or painted onto the cookies. It will dry firm and smooth with a matte finish.

Use the fondant icing as the base coat and plan to make one batch for each color desired.

Additional decorations can either be added while the fondant is still wet (such as candies and sugar decorations) or once it has dried (such as drawing with the icing "pens" available at many grocers).

Sugar decorations, such as tiny pumpkins, bats, skulls, eyes and ghosts, can be purchased at craft and baking stores. These cost just pennies and make decorating fast and simple.

Don't be intimidated by the length of the recipe or number of ingredients. This recipe is combined for both the cookies and the icing; both are fast and easy to make.

Ghoulish cookie pops

Start to finish: 2 1/2 hours (1 12/ hours active, including decorating)

Makes about 24 cookies

Equipment:

3- to 4-inch Halloween cookie cutters

Twenty-four 8-inch lollipop sticks

Parchment paper

Rimmed baking pans

Wire cooling rack

For the cookies:

3/4 cup (1 12 sticks) unsalted butter

3/4 cup light or dark brown sugar

3/4 cup molasses

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. allspice or ground cloves

1 large egg

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 egg white

For the icing:

4 cups (1 pound) powdered sugar

1/4 light corn syrup

1/2 cup hot water

1 cup white chocolate pieces

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Food coloring (white, black and orange work well)

Various icing pens or sugar decorations