McDonald's, Valentine's Day, and the Fall of Man

In the last semester I have done a lot of art centered around food.  This is partly because I'm in a class called The Edible Aesthetic, but a lot of my photography this term has featured edibles as well.  Food is so accessible and inspiring.  Everyone knows what it's like to eat, to crave.

This was my piece in a show called "In Your Mouth." The sculpture is titled "For Shame."

Many luxury items like bananas and chocolate come from the Caribbean/Africa where countless workers labor for hours in dangerous conditions to provide them for us. Our treatment of animals and farmland is dismal, but even so we keep unwrapping those magical burgers. This piece invites viewers to examine our consumption habits while referencing the "first" shameful act- an act caused by eating! We have tried to cover our shame with many things, but often what we try to cover up shows on the surface.

 

Made with fake foliage sewn together. Would have loved to use real fig leaves, but finding a fig tree proved harder than I anticipated.

 

Garments made of feux fur and lined with McDonald's burger wrappers. The wrappers say, "Created Just for You." I thought that worked on a couple different levels.

Made with discarded Valentine candy wrappers like heart-shaped boxes of candy and sweetheart boxes cut up and woven together.
That was my final project last semester for Edible Aesthetic. It was a fantastic class.  I've learned so much. 

"For Shame" focuses on what our food says about us.  These photos focus on what our food says to us.

Sweethearts are gross.  They taste like Tums without the benefit of soothing your upset stomach.  Then of course they have barely legible messages stamped onto their tiny surfaces.  "Kiss Me" "Get Real" "Go Girl!" Sweethearts come off as an attempt to drum up enthusiasm for a pointless holiday and in the end, they just sound bossy.  So, NO. I am not going to "kiss you" or "get real" or "go" because a tiny heart-shaped piece of chalk has advised me to do so.


Millions of people eat McDonald's burgers every day.  I wonder how many out of those millions notice what is written on the wrappers before they rip the paper away and dig in.  I never had.  I asked a McDonald's manager if I could have 10 or 15 of them to do an art project.  When he brought them out all clean and unwrinkled, I almost didn't recognize them for what they were.  Their pristine condition allowed me to, for the first time, notice the message they carry. 

Pretty spooky, right?  Billions of these papers were stamped with this same message so that they could go around billions of burgers.  It's the most impersonal thing in the world.  Add to that the fact that no one even reads the packaging....what's the point?  But don't we all want to believe that this tiny squashed sandwich was, in fact, "created" (not simply "made" or "slapped together") just for us?  As we bite into these little gift-wrapped grease traps, we are buying into a lie without even really being aware of what that lie is.

That's a small piece of what I've been up to lately.  Hope it makes a little sense.

Delicious Dragon

My boyfriend is wonderful. He does so much for me and I wanted to make his birthday super special. I love making cakes, but Mike isn't big on eating sweets. I needed to figure out a way to feed him a birthday treat that he would actually be excited about.

We both love reading fantasy novels, so we're kinda into dragons.

This is what I came up with.

It's a cupcake dragon! 

The strawberries were meant to be like scales. Getting them to stay on the butter cream frosting was a little challenging. I made white chocolate flames by painting melted candy onto wax paper. 

The dragon head is sculpted out of rice crispy treats and then covered in white chocolate. The original plan was to paint the head, but instead, I covered it in sprinkles. I thought that was more festive.

Rawr.


Mike thought it was great! So, I deemed it a success in that respect. We only had a small group for the party, so only a few cupcakes got eaten. I thought, oh we'll just eat the rest tomorrow...by the next day the moisture in the strawberries had made the cupcakes kinda slimy and there was mold.

I guess the moral of the story is, if you use fresh fruit eat as much as you can on the first day!

Empty Cupboard Shortbread

Today I did some baking in my new kitchen!! (It is bigger in real life. Phones don't take great pictures.)

Having a beautiful home is the advantage of moving. The disadvantage is paying through the nose to do it.


Since a shoestring budget is too extravagant for us right now, I'm doing this thing where I don't buy anything ever- except gas to get to work. It's a good plan, but I don't have a whole lot in the way of baking ingredients. I mean, I've got the basics: flour, sugar, butter, baking soda and powder. Looking at recipes online though, I kept coming up short on all the parts. So, my friend introduced me to a wonderful website called myfridgefood.com. You go on and check off the ingredients that you have and the website tells you what you can make. It's fantastic. In this way, I learned that I had all the ingredients for Easy Shortbread.  And 20 minutes later, Ta-Da!

 I was hoping to make some sort of cake, but the  shortbread turned out really delicious. I mixed a few chocolate chips into some of them for a little pizazz. They are also really delicious with some raspberry jam spread on them.

Messy Kitchens, Unfinished Business, and Hope for a Better Tomorrow

My boyfriend and I are moving to a new apartment TOMORROW! This is very exciting for a number of reasons. Please allow me to list a few:

1. It will be just the two of us. No room mates, no couch guys, no pets (except Batman the angelfish). Just us.
2. The apartment is beautiful. Cute and clean and pretty and bright. More than enough space for us.
3. I will finally (after a year) have a kitchen that I WANT to cook in!

This is what I've been working with so far

And the rest of the kitchen is worse. No clean counter space, floors that have given up pleading to be mopped. Just really a disaster. 

I do not deny that part of this is my fault. However, no one has incentive to clean if no one else cleans. Why should I bust my butt to clean a kitchen when it's just going to be nasty when I come back? 

I know that the new kitchen will be different because Mike and I have very similar habits and goals for kitchen cleanliness. It may not always be spotless, but it will never be this gross. 

Now, onto the main point of this post: 

Given that I have had this disaster area to work in, one might wonder How do you make delicious, innovative cupcakes in a kitchen I'm afraid of? 

Well, I made a box mix of chocolate cake and portioned it out into this cool pan, all the while making as little contact with the kitchen surfaces as possible.

After they baked, I let them cool, dumped them out, and put them onto a plate

The tv tray made a wonderful kitchen counter substitute. I cut off the rounded tops of the cakes so they would be square and then iced two or three stacked on top of each other.

I ended up with these charming beauties. I had planned to decorate them, but they got gone before I got the chance! Ah well.

Threadcakes!

Threadless.com sponsors an annual cake contest which I learned about last year on my favorite blog,
Cake Wrecks. Basically, you pick a t-shirt design like this one

and make a cake inspired by it.

I roped my loving  and supportive grandmother into helping me on this endeavor. We make a great team since she has mad baking/decorating skills (she's done every birthday cake in our family for 40+ years) and I have mad art skills. She was uncertain at first. She asked me, "Do you really think we can do this?" The thought that we couldn't never even crossed my mind. There were hiccups, but nothing we couldn't handle. We had a great time and I think it's a great piece for both of us to have in our respective portfolios.

You can view our cake and all the others here.

Our entry includes our baking story and lots of photos of the process.
But in a nutshell, it shows how all of this

turned into all that

Here are some details

The long knobby legs reminded me of dripping water color paint and I wanted the cake to tell a story rather than just be pretty. Including an over-turned paint bucket seemed like a good way to tie everything together. Why are there flamingos on the side of this cake? Well, because a bucket paint turned over and magically spilled to make a pretty picture...Eh, it doesn't completely make sense, but maybe it speaks to that feeling all artists get from time to time- where you're not quite sure what that blank page will turn into, but as you go along it seems to create itself.

SO, here's hoping that we win! There are a lot of fantastic entries this year and more are coming every day. I'm not sure how we stack up against the competition, but we gave it an excellent effort if I do say so myself.

Cake Crash

As a college kid, I know that Hallmark holidays can get expensive. For instance, Mothers' Day is crazy for me because in addition to a mother and two grandmothers I have a step-mother and a plethora of aunts- all of whom have taken part in raising me. When you have that many women to honor (with almost as many men to think of on Fathers' Day in a few weeks), it makes sense to do it en masse. I don't want to sound cheap, but I think holidays are more about spirit and family than knick-knack gifties. So, I felt that a tea party would be the perfect event to show all of my "mothers" how great they are.

I suppose not all women are into that sort of thing, but we are a tea-drinking, scone-eating family. We got out the good tea pots, fluffy hats, and clotted cream. We had almost as much fun setting up as we did at the party itself.

No Mother's Day tea is complete without a delicious-looking cake, right?
I made a two-layer yellow cake with lemon glaze. Unwisely, I decided that whipped cream would be a good filler between layers. Not so. The top layer slid off of the bottom layer and crashed a little. We caught it before it hit the floor, but the "after" was somewhat less impressive than the "before." It tasted fine though.

Mmm.

Fish Cakes

I had always wanted to make a big, beautiful, layered cake- like they do in all those cake shows on the Food Network. I love watching them plop the fondant on, being so careful to hold their tongues the right way. In March of last year, I decided to take on a layered cake with fondant decorations.

This happened:

But it got better: 

And then:

It still leaned in a way I wasn't entirely comfortable with, but it stayed standing long enough to be eaten.
I count it as a success. Partly because it showed me what I could do, but also because it showed me how much I have to learn.