Travel Cookie Set: Vintage Map Tutorial

In my last post I described how to make embossed leather effect cookie luggage labels for this set celebrating the Golden Wedding of a couple who love to travel. Here I'm going to show you how I made these vintage maps. Fully edible, but if you take too large a bite, you might just get lost...

You will need:

Plaque shaped cookies flooded in pale ivory and thoroughly dried
Pale ivory piping consitency royal icing
Fine edible marker
Image of an island map (I recreated New Zealand, and the Hawaiian Islands)
Small offset spatula or similar tool
Fine and extra fine food use only paintbrushes
Gel or paste food colourings in blue, brown, yellow
Piping bag and PME tip 1.5 or equivalent

1. Using the transfer method of your choice, trace the outline of the islands on your cookie. I used to use the Camera Lucida Ipad app, but have recently invested in a Pico projector which is wonder to behold. You can see it in action in Anita's video here.

2. With the offset spatula and a tiny bit of stiff pale royal icing, dab around the interior of the islands. Using a verticle movement and lots of pats, rather than spreading, creates a more mountainous terrain. Disclaimer: my mountains may not be topographically accurate. (When New Zealand is barely a centimetre wide, what do you expect?)

3. Mix up a little greenish blue paint with your food colours and a little water. Paint around the outline of the island in tiny dashes, keeping it darker towards the coastline, and fading out to sea.

4. Using a little very pale brown colour and a larger brush, daub the paint unevenly around the edges of the cookie, blotting with a clean finger or piece of kitchen roll if necessary. Fade the effect in towards the islands. Taking a fine brush and some stronger brown colour, paint the craggy lines of tears and crumples at intervals around the edges of the cookie

5. Using mossy green (mix blue, yellow and a little brown), and brown paints, add colour to the islands themselves, fading to pale brown in the interior. For the mountains of South Island, I left a few of the peaks unpainted to give the impression of snow, though it's not very clear, they really are very tiny mountains.

I also added little extra details like labels, trees, sea creatures: I added steam rising off the Rotorua area, and on the Hawaiian Islands I added palm trees, then I sort of got carried away and painted an entire whale...