Zombie fingers

• 225g softened butter
• 130g icing sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 425g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp fine salt
• For decoration:
• blanched whole almonds
• red food colouring

METHOD

1. Mix all the pastry ingredients and knead into soft dough. Wrap it in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least half an hour. Tear off chunks of the pastry and shape into fingers – make them thicker at the knuckles and mark wrinkles with a knife. Press in almonds at the ends to make nails.

2. If you get bored of making fingers – this makes a lot of zombie digits – you can just roll out the rest of the pastry and cut into squares. It makes perfectly nice shortbread.

3. Bake the fingers in an oven preheated to 200C/400F/gas 6 for about 10 minutes – they should still be pale when taken out. You can dribble red food colouring around the nails for effect – or smear tomato ketchup at the cut off end before baking.

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See also

Chocolate eyeballs

Morticia's cake

Spider web cake