Viking Metalwork Cookies

I was asked recently to make a Viking inspired cookie set as a gift for a teacher who has been teaching the Vikings all term. I didn't really want to go down the route of making actual vikings, with plaits and cartoony stuff, especially as the gift was for a bloke, who'd presumably know all about them and where precisely I'd gone wrong!

I knew pretty much straight away I wanted to create bits of viking metalwork, with lots of lustre dust, of course. Because if you can stick some lustre dust onto a cookie, you really ought to.

I decided to try and get the effect of a coloured enamel background on the cookies, so started messing about with painting with food colour. I wanted a sheen, and tried painting edible glue (the only shiny drying edible stuff I have at the moment) on top. It simply lifted up the food colour and made a streaky mess, so I ended up mixing up small batches of translucent colour by adding food gel to edible glue, with a little alcohol to thin it. It was quite easy to paint on, though needed a couple of coats in some paces, and blended quite well.


It worked reasonably well. One of the cookies was to be the Danish flag (as the gift was from a Danish family), and I piped off-white bands of royal icing with slightly rough edges, to get that 'just dug up' feel.










 Then I wanted more depth and richness to these backgrounds, so of course I turned to my lustre dust collection, blending different shades of metallic lustre, including some black. The base coat took the dust very well.












Both these plaques were to have lettering on. I marked them out by scratching into the painted surface with a scribe tool. (The font is a 'runic' inspired one from fontspace).

The letters were then piped using a tip 1.5 in dark colours, and painted over with a mixture of lustre dust, dry and wet, and the area surrounding each letter dusted with more colour.

The remaining cookies had similarly coloured bases, with designs taken from original viking decorative metalwork on them, which was, of course, painted in metallic lustre dust.