Beautifully-decorated, flower-adorned, Pinterest-perfect, multi-tiered cakes are passe. So, how about a cake in the form of a human organ such as a diseased-looking butt with a thermometer or a severed head?
New York-based cake artist Katherine Dey has taken innovation to a different level. She uses cakes as her canvas to create grotesque scenes that taste wonderful.
As a registered nurse, Dey is accustomed to seeing human anatomy and organs close up. Before that, she went to Rhode Island School of Design, where she focused on illustration and sculpture. The 31-year-old uses her medical knowledge to recreate them in the form of gory and disturbing cakes.
The mother-of-two first started making cakes a few years ago as a hobby, reported the Daily Mail. Her first project was a mushroom-covered tree stump before taking on gorier subject matters.
{{/usCountry}}The mother-of-two first started making cakes a few years ago as a hobby, reported the Daily Mail. Her first project was a mushroom-covered tree stump before taking on gorier subject matters.
{{/usCountry}}Dey starts by deciding on what she wants her cake to look like and then chooses her materials accordingly.
“If there is a danger of it falling over, I make an armature to keep it in place,” she told Vice. “I typically bake the cakes and then freeze. When it is frozen, I carve it into the basic form.”
She carries out the detailed work using either marzipan, fondant, or modelling chocolate.
“If I have elements that need a lot of detail, I go with the Rice Krispies covered in modelling chocolate for those parts. I do surface painting with colours I make out of a food colouring and frosting mixture.”
Dey is inspired by a lot of things around her.
“I love that strange feeling I get when something looks real but it isn’t. I like to make people feel two conflicting things at once. The subjects I choose are things that have interested me forever, be it anatomy, mushrooms, or portraiture,” she told BuzzFeed.
And her cakes do elicit conflicting emotions. While many praise the almost deceiving, life-like art on her cakes, there are others who think her work ‘stimulates cannibalism’.
Despite her grotesque designs, she told the Daily Mail, nobody has ever refused to eat her cakes.
“I would love to open a bakery,” she told the Mail.