Step-by-Step: Making an Edible Map

We had so much fun last week making our edible map. However, y'all really did give me too much credit because it was really easy. First of all -- oh, here's the part where my creativity credit takes a nose dive -- it wasn't a cake. I bet you could make the map with a cake, but we used sugar cookie dough. Yep, Pillsbury. It did look like a cake, though, from the angle at which I took the picture.


Really, it was easy.


What you'll need:


* Refrigerated sugar cookie dough
* Wax paper
* Sharpie marker
* an outline map to trace
* Icing and food coloring
* a knife
* any other candies you'd like to use to embellish your map (think: rivers, country border lines, capitals)


What we did:

Step 1: Trace the map outline onto wax paper.


Step 2: Turn the wax paper with the traced side down so that your map dough is a mirror image of the country outline.





Step 3: Shape the dough. Then, flip it over onto a cookie sheet so that it is now representing the actual shape and orientation of the country you're making.

Step 4: Bake according to package directions. Let me make a few important notes here.


First: If you have smaller outlying areas (in our case Alaska and Hawaii), you might want to bake them separately because they will get done much faster. Trust me on this one.



Second: You may need to bake your cookie longer than directed so that the center gets done. We had to add additional time.


Third: Sugar cookies puff up a lot. Which caused us to need to add...



Step 5: Your cookie has probably puffed up enough that it hasn't retained the original shape that you were going for. We placed our wax paper outline back onto the cooled sugar cookie and used a knife to cut the shape out of the baked cookie. Looking back, it probably would have been just as effective to spread the cookie dough out to completely cover the cookie sheet and bake it all like a pan cookie, then, cut the shape out at the end.


Step 6: Ice the cookie and add any candy embellishments that you desire. Take some pictures to share, then...enjoy!


Btw, the Great Lakes are green because I didn't realize that we were out of blue food coloring until we got ready to add the icing.


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