Entries tagged with 'books'
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[Image: Amazon] Is it possible for cakes to be so bad they're good? Yes, yes it is. And thanks to Jen Yates, we don't have to wait for a baby shower or bat mitzvah invitation to see them. Back in May of 2008, Yates started the blog Cake Wrecks, an online museum of badly-rendered Disney princesses, gratuitous quotation marks, carrot-riding babies, and other wrecky cake artwork by professional bakers. This week, the book version of the frosting debauchery, Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong, went on sale and it's full of 75-percent never-before-seen material. Thanks to the good folks at Andrews McMeel Publishing, we have five (5) copies of to give away. All you have to do...
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Photograph: The Argus I love this story from last week in The Argus, which mentions a British artist finding a slice of bacon left as a bookmark in a returned library book. I've used all manner of items as impromptu bookmarks over the years (yarn, movie tickets, bus passes, a dollar bill), but I don't think I've ever used a food item. And the disappointing thing is that, if this is the actual book-and-bacon combo, it's not even in a cookbook. (Then again, the way some of my most-used cookbooks look, I may have well used a slice of bacon to mark a favorite recipe.) The funny thing is that people do seem to use food as bookmarks. The...
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"The classic Wrecks are those that are misspelled, misunderstood, or trying way too hard to be creative." Since May of 2008, Jen Yates has been documenting moldy feet, pregnant bellies, and misplaced apostrophes spotted on cakes on her wildly popular blog Cake Wrecks. Very quickly, Jen has made a career out of ridiculous cakes. Her new blook (blog-turned-book?) Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong comes out on October 1, and features a bunch of brand-new content. Yes, that means more creepy baby cakes! We chatted with Jen about the Cake Wrecks concept, what holidays are most wreckable, and more. So, let's start at the beginning. The Cake Wrecks creation story. It quite literally began with "The Cake That...
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[Image: butter-beer.com] Ever wondered what butterbeer and pumpkin juice would taste like? Well, next spring you can find out at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park slated to open at the Universal Orlando resort. According to Nation's Restaurant News, the Harry Potter wonderland will have two pubs, the Hog’s Head and Three Broomsticks, which will feature a menu of "traditional British fare and drinks." If you don't spend all your money on the gift shop's robes and Quidditch gear, you can also look forward to Chocolate Frogs and Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Beans at Honeydukes, the park's sweets shop. Any other Harry Potterian cuisine they should include? Related Harry Potter and the Legend of the ICE Cooking ClassHarry...
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"Those who are calling this movie a stunt are missing the point." Colin Beavan with his daughter Isabella. [Photographs: noimpactman.typepad.com] Nearly two years ago, I logged into my website Eat Local Challenge to find a large spike in hits. An article had been published in the New York Times about Colin Beavan, aka "No Impact Man," and his New York-dwelling family. Beavan had embarked on a year-long journey to make no net impact on the earth. The family didn't use electricity, bought nothing new, and famously stopped using toilet paper. So why the spike on Eat Local Challenge? Beavan's blog had linked to mine in reference to his family's no-impact efforts to eat food from within 250 miles of Manhattan....
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[Image: weloveyouso.com] In anticipation of the new Spike Jonze adaptation of the kids' lit classic Where the Wild Things Are, 29-year-old Brazilian artist Vanessa Dualib recreated the book's cover with kiwi, mango, anise, and, yes, that would be mozzarella for Max's wolf suit. Dualib is a very accomplished player-with-food. You can check out her other artwork, including an eggplant orca whale and prosciutto teepees, in her Flickr album ρLªYinG ωiTh mŸ fOoD. Related In Videos: Trailer for 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' Serious Eats Gift Guide: Books For Young Foodies Meatastic Children's Book Illustration...
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From left: The 97th Step, Farmer Boy, and Tattoo. There are only so many paragraphs about marrow bones and congealing aspics a person can read. After a few hundred pages of gastro-literature, it's nice to return to other books that don't make you want to eat your hand. If you're ready to branch out into "normal" books, but don't mind a few sporadic stomach growls, check out this Metafilter thread. "I'm not particularly interested in novels about food; rather, I'd like to read more novels that are generally interesting and happen to include florid food accounts," says one reader. Others have poured in with ideas. The 97th Step is a sci-fi novel but the protagonist is a big gourmand....
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"I was objectively chubby by age four, fat by age six, and was on the Atkins diet for the first time at age eight." —Frank Bruni Photographs by Robyn Lee For all of the serious eaters who overdosed on the hype surrounding Julie & Julia (hey, the back of my head was in the movie, so if I'm guilty as charged there's a good reason for that), I'm giving you a heads-up that the hoopla accompanying the publication of Born Round, now former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni's memoir, is going to make Julie & Julia seem like it was an under-the-radar phenomenon. The book is in stores today, so let the Bruni media madness begin (it actually...
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"As the category expands, it’s becoming more challenging to navigate the world of gin." Gin gimlet. Photograph from Martin Kimeldorf's Pixel Playground on Flickr In case you haven’t noticed from the gradually expanding selection in the liquor store, gin is on an upswing. Dozens of brands and variations have been introduced in the past decade, and start-up distillers are adding novel gins to their liquor portfolios as the divisions between styles of gin become increasingly blurred. At a time when this gin market growth and a renewed interest in gin-based cocktails have the potential to confuse even the most ardent of enthusiasts, a new book on the spirit has been released by Gaz Regan, one of the most entertaining chroniclers...
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For all our collective obsession with food, dining, and the so-called joy of cooking, there's very little said about what happens to all that matter once we swallow it. Thus Danielle Svetcov's The Un-Constipated Gourmet: Secrets to a Moveable Feast, a cookbook with an eye towards promoting, er, gastrointestinal regularity. With lengthy discussions about different cultures' approaches to digestive health and a "Go Meter" rating each recipe, this isn't a book that dances around its unappetizing subject. "The result is part culinary history, part mouthwatering cookbook, and part inquiry into nothing less than our bodies themselves," writes Chris Colin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Surely, Hemingway is rolling over in his grave....
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