A Cake Cookbook Strictly for Inspiration
Cakes are like clothing. You can have a good buttery pound cake that is as simple and everyday as an old pair of blue jeans. But sometimes a baked good just needs to feel pretty. For those special occasions there are decorated cakes. And when it comes to the latter, apparently there is no such thing as too much.
The Gianni Versace of the baking world is Margaret Braun, owner of a Manhattan shop and creator of some of the most gloriously over-the-top cakes you can imagine. A Margaret Braun cake is not so much something to eat as an art object. It resembles its more earthbound cousins in the same way that a Louis XIV escritoire resembles a desk from Sears. Now Braun has written a cookbook, “Cakewalk” (Rizzoli, $50). Think of it as the anti-”Cake Mix Doctor.”
Books such as this one need to be approached on their own terms. Belittling this as the least cook-able cookbook of the year would be like criticizing haute couture fashion for not keeping you sufficiently warm. “Cakewalk” is one of those special books that exists outside the parameters of normal cookbookery. It pays barely a nod to the mainstream; there are only a dozen or so recipes--or, more accurately, things that resemble recipes--and they are stuck in the back, kind of like maids in the pantry.
And that is as it should be. “Cakewalk” is not there so much to cook from as to be inspired by. Braun’s cakes, photographed by Quentin Bacon as if they were modern sculptures, are astonishing to behold. Out of such plain stuff as royal icing, marzipan and butter cream, she fashions drapes and swags, brightly colored fruits and endless strings of pearls. Cakes are decorated to resemble Meissen porcelain, Greek mosaics and the fruit-constructed paintings of Arcimboldo. There’s even an “Homage to Linoleum.”
This kind of artistry exists on a separate plane from everyday reality. These are fever dreams of cakes, fits of inspiration. To try to replicate them at home would be pointless. Indeed, it even would be a little demeaning--as if the only thing keeping a normal person from making cakes like these is one scant page of instructions
The very idea of taking this thing into the kitchen is enough to make a normal person shudder. But then a normal person would never attempt to make such things. And wouldn’t the world be a poorer place for that?
