For your Friday reading enjoyment…Map Cookies! GIS / cartography firms should send these to clients and have them at their holiday parties. Cool.
Don Meltz (@DonMeltz) points us to a couple of sites that have map cookies on them:
This place seems to have made these cookies as a custom-order. I used their online form to find out how much it would cost for them to make me a few of these. We’ll see what they come back with as it would be nice to send them to people that I want to thank (they individually wrap them).
Apparently you can order a globe cookie cutter at this place, but they only show the cookie, not the cookie cutter. And, as Don pointed out, it does look like a lot of work. (Not that we cartographers shy away from a little bit of map fussiness, I’m sure.)
You can also get cookie cutters on Amazon, though the ones here don’t look very promising:
Here we have half of Michigan State. Mike Hyslop (@mikehyslop) points out that perhaps they’ve just got the picture wrong and that the rest of the state is actually included in the package as a separate cookie cutter. Let’s hope.
Mark Ireland points out that there’s even one for Wyoming – though I’m thinking that if you wanted Wyoming you might just cut them yourself?! (Another Wyoming map joke in this post). Also, not sure what projection this is in, but Wyoming is not that square.
I do have to point out that the U.S. cookie cutter from the same company looks like a good bet if you want to make your own map cookies:
#1 by Mark on December 9, 2011 - 5:36 pm
I couldn’t resist and just bought Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Dakota. The excuse is they are for my wife who’s lived in all those places. Luckily her line of work is politics and not geography, so she’s not likely to notice if the shapes are a little wonky!
#2 by Gretchen on December 10, 2011 - 12:20 pm
@Mark – great! You’ll have to let us know if Michigan gets shipped with the UP.
#3 by Gretchen on December 10, 2011 - 12:22 pm
I forgot to mention in the post that @spara has another map cookie idea. Apparently you can buy hobby brass and bend it in whatever shape you want. So you could download state/country shapes and use them as templates or make your own with your mapping program of choice, put the brass together somehow (not sure how that part would work) and then start making cookies!
#4 by Sara on December 14, 2011 - 6:54 am
This gave me a great idea for my son’s 6th birthday in January. He is obsessed with maps at the moment (both my husband and I are geographers) so I think I will just plot a large USA map from GIS and use it as a template for sugar cookie dough. He will love a giant map cookie!
#5 by Gretchen on December 14, 2011 - 7:09 am
@Sara Nice!
#6 by Heather Cowley on December 14, 2011 - 4:13 pm
Around 2003, I went to a presentation of ESRI in Seattle. They had cookies to decorate. Well, I’m a distant cousin of Roald Amundsen, the first guy to make it to the south pole, so I decorated my cookie as Antarctica. I won the cookie decorating contest for originality, and won a t-shirt.