Goodbye Seattle, Hello New York
I’ve been quiet on this food blog since my residency at Arabica in Seattle ended, and I never intended to post much once it did. Although I have worked as a pastry chef for several years now (and been an artist and writer for much longer), I don’t think I have the discipline to post here consistently about the projects I’ve been doing.
Besides that, I’ve been extra busy - a couple weeks ago I started a new job! I’m back in New York and I’ve been working at Kreemart, collaborating with contemporary artists and creating conceptual projects using dessert as a medium. It’s amazing. I’ve written about Kreemart before but it’s hard for me to find the words to express how much I love what they do and the projects and editions they produce.
Raphael Castoriano, the founder of Kreemart, has said that he started Kreemart based on the idea that both art and dessert are non-essential luxuries. What purpose do they have, besides to give us pleasure? Do we really need art? Unhealthy sugary treats? We may want it, desire it, and be compelled to produce it, but you could say that both art and dessert are over-indulgent and have no substantial ‘nutritional value’. Agree or disagree, this idea has instigated all of the projects Kreemart has created and has produced an impressive body of work.
If you still want to follow food and art-related projects I’m working on the you can ‘like’ Kreemart on Facebook to get updates or follow us on Twitter. There are several exciting things we’re planning during the next few months and if you’ve enjoyed watching what I’ve been doing at Arabica I think you will like this, too!
Thank you to everyone that has followed my blog this far and has given me such great feedback. Here are a few pictures of some of the past events Kreemart has produced in the past year. Enjoy!
Photos from an event at Haunch of Venison, a gallery in NYC, in partnership with American Patrons of the Tate and several different artists including Olaf Breuning, Janaina Tschäpe, Ryan Mcnamara, Terence Koh, and more.
Pastry ninjas! Also from Haunch of Venison.
Chocolate cake with a gold flake kiss, cast from Marina Abramovic’s own lips, from her large exhibition last year at MoMA.
Amazing Cuban artist group Los Carpinteros and their butcher shop-inspired cake outlet (featured sickly sweet and glazed red velvet) at CIFO during the last Art Basel Miami.
Marina Abramovic’s sugar-cast nose, presented to guests at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. Yum!
I made chocolate truffles. Nothing too exciting, really - just trying to finish up long overdue Christmas gifts. Although tempering chocolate gives me an excuse to use my infrared laser thermometer (best thing ever) and that’s always a plus!
I’ve been meaning to make a cake for my cat. Maybe this makes me qualify as 100% crazy cat lady, but I don’t care. My cat is amazing and I think gourmet pet food is a totally unexplored market in the culinary industry. I was at the grocery store the other day and a coiled up octopus tentacle caught my eye… what if I put it in gel? Sometimes I think everything would look better in gel. This is what I made. Yes, I know I’m weird.
It’s really simple. It’s usually better to keep it that way. Just octopus and agar jelly (which fittingly is derived from seaweed) and flying fish roe. I started piping anchovy mousse on it too but I didn’t like the way it looked, so I took it off. The blue is food coloring but it’s all natural. 
It reminds me of looking into an aquarium… a really psychedelic aquarium. Of course by the time I finished making this and taking pictures my cat had wandered off and gotten stuck in a blanket. I got him untangled and then he promptly fell asleep. Oh well.
So cute!
I love my kitty.
I was going to make him something with sea urchin, too, but by the time I got home from the store it died! This is the second one I’ve killed this week. The first one I brought home and put in the fridge, where I poked at it for a few days until one morning, when I finally had time to kill it, it had lost its wiggle. I’ll try again soon.
About his own work he has said, ”I’m interested in depicting an imagined utopia, a place that’s only about pleasure.” This resonates with me because out of all foods, pastries and cakes have to be the most pointless, unhealthiest, awful things to eat. There is no dietary benefit to desserts but yet they symbolize so much and involve so much ritual. They exist for pleasure, for gluttons, for feasting. They make you fat and happy (or unhappy, I suppose), and if you eat too much they make you physically ill! The superficial world that Will Cotton creates is one of excess without consequences, and I wouldn’t mind visiting now and then.
One project of hers that I liked in particular was called ‘
These images are from the MOCA Annual Gala in LA last month. Pastry chefs and artists created two life-size cakes of Marina Abramovic (the gala’s hostess and one of my favorite people getting a lot of attention right now) and Debbie Harry. The concept is brilliant but the technical part alone is really intriguing… structuring a cake like this is tricky and the quality of the fleshtone and skin texture is impressive. Fondant? Airbrushed edible paint? Hmm…
Another project they organized for the opening day of Art Basel in Miami was a piece called 
When I first walked into SLOW Experience the owner, Sunny, ran out of the kitchen to greet me with a piece of okra in his hands - part of his lunch, which he kept running back to check on in between chatting with me. Sunny created SLOW Experience as a showroom and learning space for Hong Kongers to learn more about sustainable food, living practices, and local production. He creates beautiful set menus listing ‘food miles’, as well as organizing delivery of vegetables and produce from local farmers in New Territories, a more rural part of northern Hong Kong. He also created a SLOW Experience ‘rooftop farm’, which I’m guessing is one of the only rooftop farms in all of Hong Kong.
As amazing as it is in Hong Kong, the sustainable food scene in China as a whole is pretty grim. People generally don’t think about where their food comes from, and sustainable agriculture or home farming is almost non-existent. Sure, in Portland or Seattle or Brooklyn there are a million organic rooftop gardens or families with backyard chicken coops (it’s even trendy now!), but in Asia? In particular, Hong Kong? Sunny is on a one-man mission here. He is doing things with food and agriculture that no one else is doing and I think that is not just special, but really, really important. Over the two hours I was there I hung out and talked to Sunny and Kobe (the manager of ACO) about the projects they were doing and the future of Hong Kong, and the hope for a more sustainable, more aware culture. Between the two of them they are doing a lot of great work to dispel the stereotype of Hong Kong being yet another superficial, short-sighted Asian city. 
This was a joy to plan. Designing the menu is almost my favorite part of organizing events like this. I suggest you read the hi-res, blown-up version 
Hard candy jewels, sour fizz dust, Mouth Cakes, gold dusted bars of chocolate, Eat Cake…
Gold pyramids, gel isaphan cubes, egg shells filled with chocolate cake…
Pie pops, rose gel, and tiny little hollow chocolate bars filled with love letters I’ve saved since I was 16. They were given to me by my first madly-in-love, epic letter-writing boyfriend. I have an entire box of them and I’ve moved with them everywhere - Oakland, Philly, NYC, Hong Kong, even two separate boats! I wanted to let them go but I wanted to do it in a special way, and I thought this was a suitable send-off. I also liked the idea of making the people eating them sort of uncomfortable; reading love letters is a personal thing, something you don’t share. At the end of the event a really nice couple came up to me to say that they loved reading the letter inside their chocolate bar, and was I really sure I wanted to give it away? Yeah. I like to imagine that they will keep the letter they got, preserve it in a box somewhere and treasure it.
This was the Pleasure Cake. It had headphones attached to it and when you listened it played sounds of pleasure… moaning, gasps, primal audio joy. The cake was the most decadent of the entire menu, a nearly flourless deep, dark chocolate cake.
Dropper extracts and edible perfumes. Extracts included shiso leaf, rosemary, szechuan peppercorn, lavender, birch bark tar (potent!), saffron, and my personal favorite, laxative! The atomizer perfumes were rose, pungence (durian-based), and numbness (a clove-based numbing spray - sort of like a do-over for your mouth). Most of these are still at Arabica if you would like to try them. They go great with vermouth or even just sparking water.
Pure and synthetic civet scent jars were appropriately stationed in the bathroom. I have always been fascinated with perfumes, especially increasing obsolete scents like civet, but it wasn’t until I started researching menu ideas that I realized civet was once a common ingredient in food. Up until the 60’s it was used as an additive in canned fruits to give them a more ‘earthy’ taste, and there are cookbooks dating back to the 1600’s documenting recipes using civet, as well as musk or ambergris (another fascinating and hard to find smell). Yet civet is such a pungent, repulsive odor… this is what fascinates me, the sweet/sour juxtaposition and conflict of things that are desirable combined with things that are disgusting. I also liked the idea of playing with a scent that is literally banned and nearly impossible to find in the US. Artificial replications of civet are used extensively in modern perfumery but they smell nothing like the real thing. The concept of banning or restricting the use of something so base and natural as a smell is sort of wild to me, and exploring the blurs between natural/artificial in perfumery as well as food is really interesting. There are entire industries based around regulating our concepts of scents, flavors, foods, etc (I’m thinking of the IFRA, Givaudan, IFF, the list goes on) and I find it all a bit mind boggling. Maybe in fifty years from now there will be no delineation and we really won’t know what is what anymore… fake is real and real is fake. I appreciate science and perhaps a little intervention isn’t so bad, but I have to admit the future of food and natural sensory perception seems a little scary.
Plaster petit fours in the display case. I made over 200 of these tiny, itty bitty (most were 1” long) fake tartlets. I’d always wanted to fill a glass case up like this but I also made them as a small tribute to one of my absolute favorite artists, Charles LeDray. Specifically in reference to his piece ‘Milk and Honey’, here:
Mouth Cake. I made six small cakes that were decorated with extreme close-ups of my mouth. The cake was filled with matching pink-red frosting in the middle and the outside was covered in desiccated coconut, to blend in the with shag fur display. That red shiny thing on the left is a candy jewel slowly melting onto the shag due to inevitable humidity (I hate humidity, it makes sugar work impossible).
The aftermath and mess of feast and gluttony. I love it.
The illuminated cube once displayed more clear isaphan gels. They went fast.
Ok, this cake was a little controversial… this was the ‘Victoria Cake’. Inside was blood, piss, and clumped hair (all mine) and on top, sprinkles (of course). I wanted to make a disgusting cake, something pretty and lurid that reminded me of those awful processed pastries in white generic boxes at every grocery store in the USA (honestly the idea of eating those things is way more disgusting than eating a cake made out of blood, but I know that’s just me and I’m a little, as they say, ‘different’). It was clear on the menu what it was and yet people ate it anyway! Crazy! I want to put this on my resume… I’m such a great chef that I can convince people to eat tangled up hair and piss mousse! Ha ok, sorry, sorry… I probably just grossed out everyone reading this.
The next morning. Somehow some of the shag fur we used ended up on the crosswalk outside Arabica. That’s desiccated coconut all over the sidewalk. Awesome.
Holly, one of the amazing baristas at Arabica, made these pins to surprise me. So sweet.
Post clean-up I gave up on being vertical. I’m wearing my favorite Christmas sweater, which coincidentally I bought with Jojo when I took him to his very first trip to Goodwill. It was a special day.
Pol Rosenthal - who, in addition to being an outstanding person and talented artist, has been my forgiving and patient roommate as of late - just finished a guest curation stint on the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s blog, 
I made a new riff on one of my favorite cakes, the 
Starting from the bottom, we have: sesame oil cake, strawberry buttercream, matcha green tea genoise, dark chocolate glaze, matcha green tea buttercream, and then more dark chocolate glaze.
Elk meat, destined for a perfume I am cooking up.
Chanterelles in white chocolate.
Tinctures, syrups, sprays. That 151 stuff is potent! I don’t fuck around.
Infusions. The one with the spoon in it is birch bark tar… wow. It’s intense.
