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...

Travel Cookie Set: Luggage Label tutorial

You wait ages for a tutorial and then two arrive at once!

In this post I shall be showing you how I made these 'embossed leather' luggage labels and in the next, the vintage maps with three dimensional topography.

The brief for this set was to combine the elements of a Pacific island cruise, vintage map hobby and 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration. I threw in a few hibiscus flowers and, of course, plenty of gold lustre. But I wanted to create a contrast with the aged leather luggage labels making use of these great 'leather' tutorials by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa.

You will need:

Label shaped cookies with hole 

Brown royal icing in piping and flood consistencies

Piping bags with PME tips 1.5 and 2 or equivalent

Dark brown and black gel or paste food colouring and dusts

Water

Both fat and fine food use only paintbrushes

Gold lustre edible paint, or lustre dust with a little essence to dilute

String (edible or not, your choice!)

A note on the cookies: I don't have a cutter for these, I simply cut out rectangles with a scalpel and ruler, chopped off two corners, and poked a hole using a large bore tip, or a straw. 

1.  In order to create a twist on the leather idea, I decided to see if I could 'emboss' the lettering into the surface. I considered using the royal icing embossing effect I created for my first 'What's New, Honeycat?' tutorial, Coffee and Cookies, for Cookie Connection, but that technique needs a bit of speed before the flood layer crusts over and I wasn't sure I could get the lettering to be neat enough. So I chose to pipe the letters first and flood around them. 

2. Once the lettering had thoroughly dried, I piped brown flood around the rest of the cookie (piping a small ring around the hole first to act as a dam). It was a little tricky piping around the letters. I used a PME tip 2, and a scribe tool to ensure all the crevices and corners were filled. I let this dry overnight.

3. To get the general leather effect, I used a mixture of the methods mentioned above by Yankee Girl Yummies and LilaLoa, painting and dusting  in blotches, using fat soft brushes and mixtures of browns and black. When it came to the letters though, I used a paintbrush and darker paint around each section of each letter, to create more depth. I wanted these letters to look like they'd really been stamped into the leather.

4. Once the paint was dry (really just a matter of a few minutes in the deyhdrator) I used edible metallic paint in gold to highlight the lettering. Gold lustre dust mixed with a little essence would have worked fine here too, but I'm finding the ready made paint by Rainbow Dust (similar or the same as what's in their Click and Twist pens) to be really bright, as well as drying without leaving a dusty surface, even if you paint it on quite thickly. 

The metallic paint dries quickly too, so all that remains is to pop a piece of string in the tops and tie them to your luggage.

Now your luggage is sorted, you'll need to make sure you've got your maps ready. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss the next installment!