Edible Art

First of all as someone who has spent 2.5 years working at DQ I must expound upon DQ ice cream cakes. At DQ Glen Ellyn we have about 120 ice cream cakes on hand. We do custom order cakes. This is where a lot of the complex cakes designs come from. The cakes are totally made of ice cream (no flour/cake involved). The middle is usually a fudge "cake crunch" (a crunchy chocolate covered in fudge) or a pie crust center. The sold center help the cake hold its shape. People come in with all kinds of ideas of what they want their cake to look like. In our store there is a photo album of some of the designs our cake decorator, Terry, has made. Some of the designs include drawings of babies and alphabet blocks for baby showers, dinosaurs, trucks, and every kind of sport. A cake that was ordered recently was made to be shaped like a cat and had some plastic decorations for the tail and collar. One of the most popular ways to decorate a cake is with a "deco" set, a set of plastic items that give the cake a theme. I have decorated a few cakes for last minute orders. One of the cakes was a bowling lane drawn with colored agar gel, then at the end of the lane was a set of mini bowling pins and a bowling ball. They were set to look as if the ball was just hitting the pins and the pins were shooting in every direction. On another cake the gel was used to make the cake to look like a baseball and had mini baseballs around the perimeter. Some people even bring their own items that they want incorporated into the cake. Besides the gels special edible spray color, butter creme icing, and edible images (photos) are used for decoration. You can eat "Hannah Montana's" face, or Uncle Bob's face. The tricky part to ice cream decoration is there is a time limit before the cake needs to be refrozen. Also some of the deco items insert better into soft ice cream while gels need to be on a totally frozen solid surface.





I also looked at a website that displayed various kinds of edible art. Some of the art included Japanese packaged meals shaped to become common objects, people placed in a food"scape", and vegetable sculptures. All of these artists put their own creative twist on "edible art."

http://weburbanist.com/2009/01/08/food-art-and-food-artists/