The Bake Sale as High Art

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Last fall the staff of Britain’s Art Fund, which supports hundreds of museums and galleries across the U.K., decided to test out a brilliant fundraising idea: a bake-off in which art fans across the land produce comestible homages to their favorite works of art.

To get started and provide inspiration, the Art Fund commissioned a selection of Edible Masterpieces, developed with professional recipe testing by Georgia Levy, food styling by Kim Morphew, and prop styling from Lydia Brun. They include a sponge cake rendition of a Mondrian painting, a shortbread Wedgewood plate, and a Rice Krispies treat splattered with white and black royal icing à la Jackson Pollock.

"My main aim was to recreate the masterpieces so they looked as close to the originals, but also so they could be recreated by a non baker too," Morphew told me in an email. "Everything used in the masterpieces is edible."

One of the trickiest pieces to create was the Wedgwood cake, she said: "I really wanted the plate to look like a plate, so I experimented with the shortbread by baking it on different plates. Too much butter and the shortbread would break, too thin and it would catch on the edges of the plate and break when I iced it. In the end I succeeded with a totally edible plate."

To recreate Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), she put the Rice Krispies treat on a board on the floor. "I am a massive Pollock fan," she said, "so when painting the crispy cake I used his techniques but with different coloured icings instead of paint ... to really achieve the Pollock feel."

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