This Flea Market Find Will Bring Vintage Vibes To Your Halloween Celebrations

If you're a fan of thrift stores, garage sales, or online auctions, there's one vintage find you may be overlooking: holiday cookie cutters. Sure, Christmas ones may be the easiest to find, but Halloween cookie cutters are also a thing, and they come in cute shapes like witches, pumpkins, ghosts, cats, and  broomsticks.

You may be able to find both plastic and metal cookie cutters, and if the price is right and they look nice, snatch up either one. The metal ones, however, are better for your bakes. My family has a set of midcentury trick-or-treat "cooky" cutters of a type that can be found in abundance on eBay, and they still cut much cleaner than any plastic ones I've ever used.

Once your cookie cutters are cleaned up, you'll want to make sure that the designs come through as clearly as possible. One way to make sure your sugar cookies hold their shape is to chill the dough before rolling it out, a trick that will also work should you happen to prefer Halloween gingerbread. (Who says it's only for the winter holidays?)

Even if you're not into making rolled cookies (and I feel you; I'm all about bar cookies myself), you can still put those Halloween cookie cutters to good use. Super-ambitious cooks could try their hand at a spooky version of the traditional holiday Yule log: a bûche de Halloween decorated with fondant cats and bats. Those of us who prefer to do things the easy way can simply frost a sheet cake and use the cookie cutters as a stencil for black and orange sugar or sprinkles.

Halloween cookie cutters can also be used to shape pancakes or eggs — again, the metal ones have the edge (literally) for this, since plastic might melt — or to slice sandwiches. If you want to get fancy, you could even cut bread into Halloween shapes and make bruschetta. Cookie cutters can also be used for non-food purposes: Trace around them to make construction paper cut-outs for decorating or party invitations, or just tie them together with orange and black ribbons to make Halloween garlands. If you're hosting a vampire-themed dinner party, complete with skeleton-hand goblets and gothic candelabras, you could employ your cookie cutters as napkin rings. Whatever you choose to do with them, Halloween cookie cutters will make for a display that's both eye-catching and original.