Halloween Advent Calendar Haunted House

Make your own Halloween advent calendar with this easy haunted house craft and baking project! A wooden Christmas advent calendar is transformed with black spray paint, fake cobwebs and tiny spiders, then filled with Halloween lollies, trinkets and homemade mini cookies. It's a low-effort Halloween craft that adults and kids can enjoy, with ideas for keeping homemade treats fresh inside the drawers.

About This Halloween Advent Calendar

It's almost Halloween my pretties and that means I have some fun Halloween ideas for you. This Halloween Advent Calendar is an easy, fun craft and baking project. We create a Haunted House advent calendar and fill it with goodies from trinkets to snacks to home baked cookies. Every day you will find something new to look forward to!

I've made a few edible haunted houses over the years too, including these Haunted House Cookies, Haunted House Cupcakes, a Halloween Gingerbread Witch's House and a Hogwarts Gingerbread Cake. But this is the easiest of them all!

Video How To Make A Halloween Advent Calendar

Steps For Making A Halloween Advent Calendar

1 - Carefully remove the lights and battery pack before spray painting as we don't want to spray the light bulbs black. Then once the paint has set, replace the lighting.

2 - Make sure to spraypaint outside and use paper or cardboard to protect the area.

3 - We spraypainted (and by we I mean Mr NQN haha!) the house one day and baked the cookies and decorated them and then filled the house the next day. I wanted to make sure that the paint was dry and that the royal icing on the cookies had set completely hard so that I could wrap the cookies.

4 - Hot glue the spiders onto the house. Place the items inside the drawers and then finish with some fake spiderwebs.

5 - Fill each drawer with a range of food and trinkets!

Halloween Advent Calendar Recipe

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Recipe Overview

Preparation time: 45 minutes plus chilling and setting time

Cooking time: 13 minutes

Makes: 48 mini cookies (this makes more than you'll need)

Ingredients Needed

• 85g/3ozs butter, softened
• 140g/5ozs white caster superfine sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 180g/6ozs all-purpose flour (or a bit more, I needed about 30g/1oz more for this batch)
• You will also need a mini Halloween cookie cutter set that will fit the drawer size

For Royal Icing

• 180g-200g/6-7oz pure icing or confectioners sugar
• 1 egg white (30g/1oz)
• Food colouring in orange, brown, black, green and yellow (depending on your cutters)

Step-By-Step Instructions

Step 1 DOUGH - Using a mixer fitted with a beater attachment, beat the butter (85g/3oz butter) and sugar (140g/5oz white caster superfine sugar) until pale. Add the egg (1 egg) and vanilla (1 teaspoon vanilla) and beat until combined. Then on the lowest speed, add the flour (180g/6oz all-purpose flour) until it becomes a pliable dough. If it is too sticky, gradually add some more flour (up to 30g/1oz more, as needed) (if it is too sticky, the dough will spread). Shape into a flat disc and wrap in cling film. Rest in fridge for 1-2 hours.

Step 2 CUT - Preheat oven to 160C/320F fan forced or 180C/350F conventional. Line two baking trays with parchment. Roll out the dough between two sheets of parchment. This dough can roll and re-roll again easily but needs to be rolled between paper. Dip a cutter into some flour and cut out. Peel away the excess dough and use a brownie lifter to gently place them on the prepared trays about 1/2 an inch apart. Place in the fridge for 20 minutes. Bake for 11-13 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes on the tray and transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Step 3 ICING - Make the royal icing. Place the icing sugar (180g/6oz pure icing or confectioners sugar) in a food processor and blitz until all lumps are gone. Add the egg white (1 egg white, 30g/1oz) and whizz until you get a stiff-ish icing that can hold a line when you draw it. If it is not stiff enough, sieve in some more icing sugar (up to 20g/1oz more) or if it is too stiff, add a drop or two of lemon juice (be very sparing). Rest this covered for about 15 minutes before using it to let the bubbles disappear.

Step 4 PIPE - Divide the icing into four bowls: leave one white and tint the other ones orange, brown and black. Keep covered. In small piping bags (see this video on how to make perfect icing piping bags, apologies for the wobbly camera work, I was very new at it!) add 1-2 teaspoons of icing and pipe around the edges of each cookie.Then in each bowl add a drop or two of water and stir well. This icing is a bit more liquid and then can be used to fill in the icing outline. Pop any bubbles and allow to set completely.

Note: If you want to halve the cookie recipe you can halve the ingredients. When it comes to halving an egg, beat the egg and then use half the beaten egg in the recipe.

Personal Note

Halloween is my favourite time of the year and during Septemeber I was ready to pounce with my ideas. There aren't as many things to buy this early in the month for Halloween so I had to make do with what I had. Mr Teddy Elliott found this advent house very fascinating and watched me as I constructed it.

I've been tossing up about whether to have a Halloween party again. The reason why I temporarily stopped having Halloween parties was because of the moth invasion that we had. A lot of people went outside during the last party as it was hot and didn't close the door so we had a lot of moths fly inside and that led to a long chain reaction of moth hell that lasted for way too long and had us contemplating selling our house. A couple of years on I decided that it might be time to have another party because I love them so much.

But then something happened.

If you live in Sydney or the South Coast of NSW you'll know the moths are back. It's the annual migration of Bogong Moths that are huge brown moths. Now these moths won't eat your clothes, they're on their way in search of cooler climates so you shouldn't kill them but they are innumerous and pop up everywhere from inside the car side mirrors to fluttering about in skylights and on porches. And I don't know but it might be just too close for me!

So tell me Dear Reader, are you contending with the Bogong moths? Do you like craft projects?