Edible Art: Sarah Anne Ward

I can’t get enough of the whole fine art/food trend. Send me a photo of an art-inspired dessert and I am all over it! So, it should come as no surprise that I am smitten with these images created by New York-based photographer Sarah Anne Ward. Inspired by famous modernist works of art, Sarah, along with food stylists Heather Meldrom and Michelle Gatton, created this seven-piece series, which includes a Koons Twinkies and a Rothko ice-cream cake, not to mention the Jackson Pollock Rice Krispie Treats (my personal favorite). So fun! I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next! For more info on Sarah, check out her website, right here. ~Erin

Pollock Rice Krispie Treats

Damien Hirst Dot Candy Skull

Richard Serra's Chocolate Curls

Rothko Ice Cream Cake

Cubist Movement Picasso/Braque Pinwheel Cookies

Mondrian Jello Jiggler Mold

Seurat Pointillism Sprinkle Sheet Cake 

Vintage Ice Cream Photographs

Sisters eating their ice-cream after having completed Saturday tasks.
From Rosmarie Wirz's family album, around 1953.

Over the weekend, I had some seriously delicious coconut ice cream, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since! Needless to say, I’ve got ice cream on my mind, so I thought it was a good time to post some vintage ice cream photos that I’ve collected over the years. I love old photographs, almost as much as I love ice cream, and with summer winding down, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share them with you! Enjoy (and go get some ice cream)!! –Erin

 p.s. I spend a great deal of time researching the original sources/photographers of these photos because I think it’s important to give credit to the creator of the image. Nothing makes me more batty than all these websites out there that post images and give absolutely no credit information. People of the internet: someone took that picture, you should at least *try* to find out who did. Okay, that is my rant for the day. Enjoy the photos! :-)

Natchitoches, Louisiana, a woman buying ice cream for children, 1940, photo by Marion Post Wolcott, New York Public Library.

From a late 1940s collection of photos at Woolacombe, North Devon, source: banksider

Ice-cream after school, Berlin, 1931 by Friedrich Seidenstücker

Women eating ice cream bars, 1949, photo by Ollie Atkins

Blackpool, England, c.1950, photo by John Chillingworth

Men eating ice cream outside pharmacy, family photo from Dressed for Tea.

Boy gives ice cream to sister, c. 1950s, photo by George Marks

Ice cream shop near Berlin, Connecticut, photo by Russell Lee

Marilyn Monroe at an ice cream parlor, 1953, photo by Andre de Dienes

You can find more vintage ice cream images after the jump.

Edible Art: Amy Stevens

When it comes to baking, there’s perhaps nothing braver than diving head first into a decorating idea, with little or no experience behind you. It takes a certain amount of confidence, and a certain amount of humor, knowing that what you are about to do could go terribly, horribly wrong. This was exactly the challenge Amy Stevens faced when she first started her Confections Series, which began as a response to her 30th birthday and quickly transformed into something else entirely.

From Amy: My original idea was to bake 30 birthday cakes for myself and photograph them. I ordered a kit from Martha Stewart.com and watched an instructional video on decorating cakes. When I quickly discovered my cakes were never going to look like the ones in the video and the pamphlet, I decided they were better off in their exuberantly imperfect states.

In the end, it’s the flaws in Amy’s cakes that make them so great. The unevenness and bright colors of the desserts, which are often set against similar graphic backgrounds, are so absurd that you can’t help but smile. The content is garish and trashy, but that’s the reason you love it. In a way, these cakes remind me of characters on a child’s television program, a claymation fantasy where the charm is in the imperfections.

Amy’s photographs aren’t all about the cakes, though. There is a deeper meaning beneath the layers: I am commenting on cake as a rich cultural symbol as well as the domestic fantasy world of contemporary home decorating magazines and television shows. It’s a fantasy world where entertaining, cooking and decorating unite. It’s a place where one needs to have a beautiful home, decorated seasonally, in order to entertain friends with gourmet meals and elaborately concocted desserts.

I really love the whole idea behind the Confections series and the photos are just mesmerizing. You can see more of Amy’s work on her website. You can also buy prints online, via her Etsy shop.

Edible Art: Sweet Veggies

There is something a little bit naughty about these candied vegetable photographs by Amsterdam-based photographer Wendy van Santen and art director Hans Bolleurs. They definitely conjure up images of childhood and the ongoing struggle to get kids to eat their veggies. I think we can all agree that more children would be eating their vegetables if they looked like these colorful creations. Personally, I prefer my vegetables to be a little less sugary, but they certainly are fun to look at! ~Erin

Tim Walker Photographs

I don’t think Tim Walker has every taken a picture that I didn’t love. I am a huge fan. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to do a post on him before. I suppose I didn’t think of him as being a “dessert” artist. Then one day I realized that sweets do pop up in his photographs, quite often.

Walker, whose work was first published in British Vogue in 1996, is a fashion photographer unlike any other. Combining both whimsy and shadow, he is able to turn an ordinary fashion shoot into a magical fantasyland that is singularly, gloriously, all his own. It is make believe without any feeling of artifice. You believe in his creation and you want to go there.

You can find more info on Tim’s photography in his books Tim Walker Pictures and Tim Walker: Story Teller. You can also view more of his dreamy photos, as well as his short films, via his website. ~Erin

Isabelle Chapuis Photography

I recently came across these quirky fashion photographs by French artist Isabelle Chapuis and instantly fell in love with them. Now, after seeing this new series by Chapuis, titled Barbapapa, I can officially call myself a fan.  The collection, which features a young model wearing cotton candy in all sorts of fashionable ways, is at once dark and humorous. The clothes, lighting, and expressions of the model are tough and moody, but the sugary pink confections brings with it the sense of silly fun. It is the juxtaposition of the hard and the soft that really makes these images special.

The Barbapapa photographs are currently on display at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris until February 17th, 2013. Personally,  I can’t wait to see more of Isabelle’s work in the future, but, until then, I’ll be enjoying these beautiful images, and the playfulness they inspire. You can check out more of Isabelle’s photographs via her website, right here. ~Erin

The Mixing Bowl: Crème brûlée by Marina Ekroos

This is the first ever “proud mama” style post that I ever written here on dessert girl. It concerns the hugely talented photographer Marina Ekroos and her new cookbook, Silmänruokaa (Visual Recipes). You may remember that a couple of years ago Marina contributed a Mixing Bowl recipe for chocolate macarons that was one of our most popular posts! Well, as it turns out, making those macarons really inspired and encouraged Marina to do more recipes and continue working on her concept of single shot recipes. For those of you who are not familiar with Marina’s work, her photographs capture the development of a recipe (ingredients, process, finished product) in a single frame, so that you get a complete recipe in one image. How cool is that? She now has an entire cookbook filled with gorgeous photos, including the macaron recipe that she created for dg, and I couldn’t be prouder! It was such a treat for me to see a dessert girl recipe in a real live book and I’m so happy to hear that Marina’s experience here was a good one. The finished product is really lovely and even though the recipes are in Finnish, I would still recommend checking it out. The photographs alone make it a great coffee table book.

To help celebrate this momentous occasion, Marina is back, sharing with us her delicious recipe for crème brûlée (see image at the top of this post), which is also featured in her book. I'm so excited that someone is finally tackling crème brûlée for this site! There is something so fun about a dessert that you have to crack open. Who doesn’t love the feeling of whacking the hard, caramelized top of a crème brûlée with a spoon? It’s such a satisfying feeling, almost as if you are excavating a cave wall, on a search for buried treasure. It’s also a great dessert for this time of year. Quite wintery and wonderful! And the perfect way to impress your friends this holiday season.

You can find the complete crème brûlée recipe after the jump. For purchasing info on the cookbook, along with information on how to buy limited edition prints from the book, click here. Thanks, Marina! ~Erin

Emilie Vercruysse Photography

I've never been a huge fan of cute kid pics. I mean, I love seeing pictures of kids that I know, children of friends and family, but I wouldn’t normally purchase a “cute kid” photograph or even dream of putting one on my wall! Well, those days are over! The minute I laid eyes on these photos by Belgium photographer Emilie Vercruysse, I was instantly smitten. The way she captures children is amazing and not at all typical. By using unique props and the bright colors, she’s able to create images which are funny and wonderfully odd, but, at the same time, still seem so authentic and childlike. Click here to check out more of Emilie's wonderful photographs. ~Erin