Buggy Leaf Spice cookies

Directions

1. Combine the flour and apple pie spice with the refrigerated sugar cookie dough in a large bowl, using your hands to knead until fully incorporated. Add about 1/4 teaspoon of brown food coloring and continue kneading until the dough resembles the shade of light gingerbread. Separate the dough into two equal portions, forming each into a disk about 1 inch thick. Wrap each disk individually and chill for at least 1 hour, or until firm.
2. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Have one or more baking sheets ready. Working with one dough disk at a time, roll it out between two sheets of wax paper until it's 1/8 inch thick. Use leaf-shaped cookie cutters that have been dusted with flour to cut out leaves. Lift the cutouts with a floured spatula and place them on an ungreased baking sheet, spacing them about 1 inch apart. Gather the dough scraps, reroll, and cut more leaves. Before baking, lightly score lines to imitate leaf veins on each cookie.
3. Bake for 14 minutes, or until the edges turn golden. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet placed on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then transfer them directly to the rack to finish cooling completely.
4. For the leaf cookies, pipe orange, green, or yellow decorating icing along the scored vein lines. Next, pipe an outline around the edges of each cookie and immediately sprinkle the wet icing with yellow decorating sugar.
5. For the ladybug and caterpillar cookies (store-bought graham cracker shapes), use a clean artist's brush to paint them with thinned icing. Thin some orange decorating icing with a few drops of water until it's spreadable, then apply it to the ladybug cookies following the embossed design. Allow these to dry for at least 2 hours. Once dry, use black writing gel to fill in the spots, legs, and head of the ladybugs. Add two red nonpareil candies as eyes. For the caterpillars, thin green decorating icing with water and paint it onto the cookie. Attach one nonpareil for an eye and pipe legs using yellow decorating icing.