How to Make an Edible Map - Teach Me, Mama

Turn geography into a delicious adventure! Learn how to make an edible map with easy ingredients. Perfect for kids’ activities, homeschoolers, and snack lovers.

My boys are currently using Easy Peasy Geography and Cultures. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a free, online curriculum. I love that they can work at their own level, but are also learning from the same scope and sequence. It includes lots of fun games, as well as helpful information. It has been something they both look forward to each day.

For this week, they were asked to make an edible map. They gave some instructions, but after our sugar cookie solar system, I knew I wanted to create something using sugar cookie dough again. So, I put everything into my Walmart cart and we got to work!

Educational Benefits of Edible Maps

Creating an edible map is more than a fun treat — it’s a multi-sensory learning experience that supports:

Geography & spatial reasoning
Fine motor skills
Following directions
Creative thinking
Early STEM/STEAM learning

What You’ll Need:

Poster Board
Sugar Cookie Dough
Rolling Pin
Parchment Paper or Silicone Mats
Cookie Sheet
Map Outline
White Whipped Icing
Food Coloring
Mini Marshmallows
Chocolate Chips
Goldfish
Construction Paper
Gold sprinkles

How to Make an Edible Map:

Making the Dough

First, you will want to let your cookie dough sit out for about 5-10 minutes. This will make it easier to roll.

Next, place your cookie dough between your parchment paper or Silicone Mats. Roll your cookie dough flat.

After that, set your outline on top of the cookie dough or freehand it to cut it. We used a butter knife. If you left your dough out, it should be very easy to cut.

Once you have the dough cut, remove your outline and any extra dough from the outline. We had to add a bit to California, Texas, and Florida to make them more defined. You should probably add a bit more to the Northeast as well. If you’re doing a different country, you may need to add more dough elsewhere.

Next, you’ll want to put your dough on your cookie sheet and place in the oven. I believe the instructions on the dough were for 8-10 minutes at 325 degrees F. We did 325 degrees F and started at 5 minute increments. You’ll want to keep an eye on it. You want golden edges. I think we ended up doing about 15 minutes, but you may need to do more or less depending on the thickness of your dough.

Making Your Map

While the cookie cooled, we started on our backdrop. We ended up cutting the poster board in half. You could definitelty use a lot more cookie dough and free hand your map, but since we used it to cut around the outline, half a poster board was plenty of space.

We put blue construction paper over the poster board and glued it down.

Next, we created our title, key, compass, etc on Canva. We printed it, then pasted onto our board.

Once the cookie was cooled, we moved it to our poster board. We mixed our white icing with green food coloring for the land. Since we were doing the US, this is the route we took.

After we spread the icing, we started with the chocolate chips, which served as mountains.

Next, we did marshmallows as hills, goldfish as our ocean, and our sprinkles as our desert.

Finally, I mixed our icing with blue food coloring. I put some in a sandwich baggie and created a piping bag. The blue icing served as the rivers.

Once we completed the landforms, we created the key. You can just using icing to get the food items to stick.

Now you have your edible map! My kids favorite part was devouring it! They said it was their favorite project ever!

Learning Can Be Delicious!

Whether you’re a parent, teacher, or homeschooler, making an edible map is an easy and engaging way to combine learning with play. Kids won’t even realize they’re picking up geography skills—they’ll be too busy having fun (and sneaking bites!).