Cooking With Kids: Sunshine Cupcakes

Here’s a tip for you: these easy cupcakes are a great craft to do with kids! We pulled out a favorite kid’s cookbook, knowing parents are already planning for Spring Break activities. We love this recipe from Barbara Beery’s series of children’s …

Here’s a tip for you: these easy cupcakes are a great craft to do with kids!

We pulled out a favorite kid’s cookbook, knowing parents are already planning for Spring Break activities. We love this recipe from Barbara Beery’s series of children’s cookbooks.

The recipe for “Sunshine Cupcakes” comes from Batter Up: Delicious Desserts, and is based off a simple vanilla cake mix. The recipe advises substituting apple juice for the water, but otherwise following box directions. Add white frosting with a little sunny yellow food coloring (and a drop or two of red) added and you get a sunshine cupcake that is as fun to eat as it is to make.

One of the things we love about Delicious Desserts is that it comes with a child-sized cloth chef’s toque that delights kids who are ready to grow their culinary skills. Kids as young as five can break an egg, stir a pot, and decorate a cupcake, after all. Give it a try–just be sure to have plenty of M&Ms, sprinkles, and pretzel sticks on hand!

The cookbook is getting hard to find, but you can still get another in the series, called Sensational Snacks (Barbara Beery, Barbara Berry. Gibbs Smith Publishers, $19.95 (68pp) ISBN 978-1-58685-365-5).

Batter Up Kids Delicious Desserts

Christmas Cookies 2023

All the bakers are no doubt baking, and everyone else is simply drooling over the bakery cases! It’s that time of year when we turn our eyes to treats, treats and more treats. Watch for new cookie recipes coming from The Food Channel!

All the bakers are no doubt baking, and everyone else is simply drooling over the bakery cases! It’s that time of year when we turn our eyes to treats, treats and more treats. Watch for new cookie recipes coming from The Food Channel!

Now Trending: Cakes that Look Like Classic Works of Art

We round up cakes that look like paintings and sculptures from artists like Picasso, Warhol, and Van Gogh. Just look at #everythingiscake or #isitcake.

Cake inspired by art is having a moment.

True, it’s never been hard to find ambitious pastry projects on TikTok or Instagram, but these are more often than not confections shaped like familiar objects: a watermelon, a camera, a pot of pasta, a kettle. (All are represented in a single video at Tuba Geckil’s TikTok account, @redrosecake_tubageckil). But there seems to be a new focus in 2022 on cake as objet d’art.

The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, for example, recently hosted its Great Blanton Bake-Off; 16 bakers recreated works of art found in the museum’s collection (21,000 works to choose from) in the hopes of winning gift cards from local pastry shops and Blanton membership packages — plus bragging rights, of course.

Blythe Johnson, the winner of the amateur category, re-created Mac Wells’ Untitled piece (see images below). Her cake had layers of blueberry almond sponge, lemon curd and whipped cream, according to Smithsonian Magazine. She made the joconde many times to find the perfect colors to match the artwork — stopping and starting over a two-week period — to complete the cake.

 

Georgia Chido, a 15-year old who won the under-18 division, reproduced a textile work by Venezuelan artist Luis Montiel (see actual item under the cake version below). She made the fondant on her own and then did all the color-matching to make sure that the cake’s hues were accurate. 

The top prize among pro bakers went to Hannah Erwin, founder of HC Confections and a business administration and marketing student at Texas A&M University. Her cakes looked exactly like six different works of art from the Blanton collections — including geometric, abstract and pop-art works (see actual items below at left and cake versions below at right).

 

When Cake Trompe L’Oeil Exploded

In March of 2022. ArtNet noted that “cakes really took off in July 2020, when Buzzfeed’s “Tasty” account posted a video showcasing the mindboggling sculptural cakes of Turkish baker and self-proclaimed cake artist Tuba Geçkil.”

This apparently kickstarted the meme #everythingiscake, which continues to thrive and has more than 12,000 examples. You might have also noticed that Netflix launched an engaging new show, Is It Cake? in March of this year based on the idea that good bakers can make cake look like anything. That hashtag — #isitcake — also has thousands of examples now.

The New York Times noticed the trend twice in 2021 with articles dedicated to trompe l’oeil cakes and whimsical cakes. Further research, however, confirms that people have been gawking at cakes as art for years, even decades. Bored Panda compiled some noteworthy works of edible art in 2020 and an article in the now-defunct Flavorwire is titled “Amazing Cakes Inspired by Art,” but none of the pictures come through (both their Instagram and website seemed to have come to a halt in 2019).

The blogger-baker-graphic designer at Sweet Fancy Cakes — Kristen from North Salt Lake, Utah — published a post with her rendition of a Mondrian in cake form in 2015 (it’s the Mondrian at the top of the article) but unlike the painting, it probably smelled and tasted as good as it looks. Earlier examples of cakes-that-look-like-art probably stretch all the way back to the 1600s — the era when round cakes were first baked in Europe, according to FoodTimeline.Org. But no one had TikTok back then….

 

Pinterest Boards of Art as Cake

Of course, there are always Pinterest boards dedicated to the topic as well as Instagram accounts by cake makers who could easily get into the forgery business — like this Russian company (Tortik Annushka) that has over a million followers.

Below are more snapshots of art as cake from Pinterest.

Mondrian Cake

Van Gogh Cake

Gustav Klimt Cake

Roy Lichtenstein Cake

Andy Warhol Cake

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1618549858264307/

Pablo Picasso Cake

Mona Lisa Cake

Keith Haring Cake

René Magritte Cake

And finally, if you want to see a demonstration of someone making a cake that looks like a painting (and frame!), check out Rosanna Pansino‘s “Cake or Fake / Painting on Cake” video below.  

Liz Marek Hosts the Sugar Geek Show

Liz Marek is an author and instructor who has been creating fun and creative food since 2009. She named her school “Sugar Geek Show” because of her obsessions with baking and #geekculture. Liz often combines her love for comic book characters, movies and anime into her cake creations. Her content is coming soon to The Food Channel!

Liz Marek is an author and instructor living in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Liz has been creating fun and creative food on her YouTube channel, which can be found at youtube.com/sugargeekshow, and at her online cake decorating school, found at www.sugargeekshow.com, since 2009. She named her school “Sugar Geek Show” because of her obsessions with baking and #geekculture. Liz often combines her love for comic book characters, movies and anime into her cake creations. Her content is coming soon to The Food Channel!