{"id":744,"date":"2025-05-31T18:28:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T18:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trimfaucet.com\/?p=744"},"modified":"2025-06-01T21:13:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-01T21:13:49","slug":"dr-ella-hawkins-reimagines-ancient-artifacts-and-prized-objects-as-edible-replicas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trimfaucet.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/31\/dr-ella-hawkins-reimagines-ancient-artifacts-and-prized-objects-as-edible-replicas\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins<\/a> has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas. <\/p>\n

Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding.<\/p>\n

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Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we\u2019d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding:<\/p>\n

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I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD (mainly as goodies to give out during talks, or as gifts for designers that I interviewed), then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases.<\/p>\n

There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost<\/em>. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book.<\/p>\n

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Delftware Tiles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito<\/a> technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below. <\/p>\n

The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth taking a look at this process video<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, England (c. 1260s-70s)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Milton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton\u2019s Cottage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Outlander Biscuit Set<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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