Endpaper: Let Them Make Cake
It is nearing 3 a.m. I have been standing almost continuously for well over 12 hours. The heels of my feet and the curve of my back are throbbing with a dull ache. A “Say Yes to the Dress” marathon on a small television behind me fills the hollow silence. The drama at Kleinfeld Bridal is starting to get old.
Still, I am having far too much fun to stop. Smeared with a messy patchwork of colorful splotches, I have a single goal: Make the icing atop the bottom left sliver of my cake mirror the pulsating lines of the bridge in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” a little more closely. My past attempts at this corner have rendered the bridge too streaky or too dark or too abstract. Not quite right. The icing is forgiving, though; I can scrape off the old attempts and try again. I will not call it a night until Munch himself would eat this slice.
Allow me to explain: I like to make famous paintings out of cake.
With icing as my paints, cakes as my canvases, and food dyes as my pigments, I aspire to turn out-of-the-oven sweets into museum-ready masterpieces. Over the past three years, I have spent days and nights bent over cakes, squinting in the lamplight as I seek to conjure up the magic that Vincent van Gogh once hit upon in a paint-splattered studio in France or the beauty that Johannes Vermeer long ago captured in a dusty home in the Netherlands. Tedious though the hobby may be, I have found no sweeter thrill than the moment in which I mix two dyes and Mark Rothko’s shade of fire-engine red appears in my bowl. I have come across no more delectable pleasure than the instant in which the eyes of my edible “Girl with a Pearl Earring” begin to gaze up at me with the alluring expression that blankets the face of Vermeer’s jewelry-clad model.
I crafted my first art cake at the end of my junior year of high school. Fresh off of a year of AP Art History, I set out to make my longtime favorite painting, “The Starry Night,” out of cupcakes. With no baking experience to fall back on and a cupcake cookbook as my only aid, I had no clue whether I had bitten off more (cake) than I could chew—but 13 hours and three containers of icing later, to my delight, my re-creation seemed, just maybe, to echo the frenzied splendor of the original. This initial foray into dessert design literally and figuratively whet my appetite to continue making art cakes.
Every cake that I have made since has presented an exciting set of challenges to address. “American Gothic” called upon me to figure out how to shade the icing—I wanted that sky to fade from a cobalt blue to a pastel tint, those treetops to plunge from a pear green to a lemon yellow, that dusty pair of overalls to slide from a shadowy navy to a light denim hue. “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” posed the question of how to eliminate figures without losing the spirit of Georges Seurat’s pointillist creation. “The Scream” taught me to use toothpicks to perfect finer details like the screamer’s horrified pupils. “Girl with a Pearl Earring” dared me to test whether the techniques that can bring van Gogh’s billowing cypress tree to life could also express the subtlety of a lady’s upturned lips.
As I have grown more ambitious in the size of my cakes and more dedicated to the details, my cake-making attempts have become increasingly time consuming: My latest project, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” stretched on for about five days before I finally declared it complete and placed it into the shiny gold frame in which I always display my finished cakes. Even my six tiny Rothko cookies took up a whole afternoon. But I find the pastime energizing rather than exhausting, perhaps because it is so unlike the pace of the rest of my life. In the countless hours that I spend mixing the most vibrant color of icing or shaping the handsomest icing pitchfork, I have no outside responsibilities. No matter what my inbox or my Google Calendar say, I have only one item on my to-do list that day: Let my imagination run wild. That spirit of creative freedom is the icing on the cake of the whole process.
As typically presented, art can feel very impersonal. When we stand in museums, surrounded by paintings we have never seen and artistic movements we have never studied, it is all too easy to think that art has little relevance. I worry that the detached nature of art threatens its future popularity. And I think that pursuits like art cakes might be the solution.
In my mind, if art stands a chance at generating enthusiasm, we each need to forge individual relationships with artwork—to make art our own. We can forge these relationships in so many different ways, from conversing about a Renoir painting over dinner, to hanging a Degas poster in a dorm room, to posing as a Rockwell illustration, to taking a selfie with a Rodin statue, to making a painting out of cake. When we interact with a work of art, we form a one-on-one bond with it. I believe those sparks of connection can keep art history classes full, museum doors open, and art lovers abundant.
Indeed, when I gazed upon “The Starry Night” at the Museum of Modern Art, or when I twirled around in a Rothko-filled room at the Phillips Collection, or when I visited the Frick Museum to get a glimpse of “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” I was not just looking at any old paintings—I was, in a way, looking at my paintings. I had participated in those paintings; I had given those paintings personal meaning; I had made those paintings special to me.
And I had snacked on a lot of cake along the way—so I guess you could say I had my cake and ate it, too.