Injecting mealtime with a healthy dose of silly

The site: www.YummyFun.com

If the Food Network were crossed with Nickelodeon, the result might look something like the animated cooking site YummyFun.

Whether it’s eggs flying into a mixing bowl or bananas dipping themselves in chocolate, the site is a lighthearted and colorful showcase of recipes in action, complete with sound effects.

Log on and listen to the buzz of a microwave as it melts chocolate, or hear the cracking of eggs on their way into a cake.

A catalog of “weird, kids’ food stuff,” YummyFun is a snapshot of “what my brain looks like,” said Clare Crespo, the Silver Lake artist who created the site.

Crespo, who has a master’s degree in experimental animation from CalArts, has made an art of playing with food. She’s crocheted hamburgers and made beanbag chairs that look like cupcakes.

She built the YummyFun Web site two years ago using her unusual recipes for foods masquerading as something else.

The site features numerous recipes -- for chocolate mice, chocolate moose, anatomical heart cookies -- but has only three animated clips, for sushi cakes (cakes that look like sushi), monkey pops (frozen bananas disguised as chimps) and a Jell-O Aquarium (blue Jell-O chilled in a fish tank).

“In my weird food world, there’s something you make in the freezer, a Jell-O recipe and something that you bake,” said Crespo, who used many of the site’s recipes in her cookbook, “The Secret Life of Food” (Hyperion Press, 2002).

When she isn’t at work building her “cupcake empire,” as she calls it, Crespo likes to guess the names of candy bars based on their interiors (www.smm.org/sln/tf/c/crosssection/namethatbar.html) and check out the panda-cam at the San Diego Zoo (www.sandiegozoo.org/pandas/ pandacam/index.html).

-- Susan Carpenter