FOOD TRENDS

A cloud captive on a plate, a meringue is a shape-shifter, an essential component of any pastry chef’s repertoire: it can be eaten nearly raw, a lightly bronzed heap of wobbly snow atop a glossy lemon pie, or baked into crunchy smithereens. Sometimes it’s barely detectable, folded into lush buttercream frosting or hidden in the delicate shell of a macaron. Its most recent main character moment was arguably the 1980s, when baked alaska and Pavlova dominated dessert plates.

Now, a new generation of pastry chefs and food artists are highlighting meringue in modern takes on sculptural sweets. Among them are the Brooklyn-based artist and chef Jen Monroe, who has made sprawling 0.5-square-metre rose water Pavlovas with candied rhubarb bows and pulled-sugar spires for her project Bad Taste; the Paris-based baker Andrea Sham, who paints meringue discs with powdered activated charcoal and spirulina to create desserts that shimmer like sea foam; the Brooklyn-based baker Samantha Raye, who documents her frilly, poodle-shaped meringue cookies on her Instagram account, @thegeminibake; and Paris Starn, a food artist, also based in New York, who encases pistachio chiffon cake layered with strawberry compote and pastry cream in frothy heaps of pastel meringue cookies and porcelainlike meringue bows.

The meringue’s exact origins are a matter of debate. Its creation is commonly attributed to a chef named Gasparini in the Swiss town of Meiringen around 1720, but a recipe for “meringues”, described roughly as “small works of sugar both very easy and very pretty”, had already been published in a 1692 cookbook by the industrious French chef François Massialot, who is also credited as the inventor of the crème brûlée. Undeniably, though, meringue is a miracle of chemistry, which one performs by agitating egg whites (or aquafaba, for a vegan version) and sugar into stiff peaks. Heated over a double boiler, it emerges stable and fluffy, the way the Swiss prepare it; beat in molten sugar syrup and you have the Italian preparation: sturdier, plusher and even more satiny.

Long before wire whisks and KitchenAids were invented, pastry cooks for wealthy Europeans and Americans relied on bundles of straw or branches to whip up meringue for visually impressive desserts like macarons and île flottante. “I think a lot about how labour-intensive it must have been when people started making baked alaska back in the 1860s, and how opulent it must have been to enjoy it, because it’s such a process,” says the pastry chef Caroline Schiff, whose nostalgic dessert menu at the Victorian-era Brooklyn oyster and chophouse Gage & Tollner is crowned with a baked alaska. The toasted bouffant of Swiss meringue — made to order and enrobing layers of mint, dark chocolate and Amarena cherry ice cream — is the most popular sweet on the menu, outselling chèvre cheesecakes and chocolate tortes with ease.

But meringue doesn’t always tempt a generation raised on the brittle, chalky chocolate available at grocery stores. “It’s something I’ve been trying to sell clients on, because I love working with it so much, and they never bite,” says Starn. “I’m making things for Instagram in the hope that others will.” She reversed her own negative opinion of the dessert on a 2019 trip to Kazakhstan, where she was entranced by cookies that featured waves of crisp meringue on a biscuit base. “There was something about the cookie with another cookie on top of it as decoration that blew my mind,” she says. “Because meringue is both chewy and crunchy, it can provide nuance to a dish that wouldn’t otherwise have it.”

While maximalist cakes garnished with purely ornamental botanicals like thistles and orchids have recently found viral fame online, bakers who prefer working with edible toppings are embracing meringue’s potential as a striking and hardy decoration with a texture all its own. Julia Aden, who worked at the renowned London bakery Violet Cakes before launching Süss Cake Studio, wraps her signature tiered cakes with rippling waves of leaflike meringue cookies. And in Los Angeles, the visual artist Rosalee Bernabe shapes meringue into puffy clouds and cheery toadstools to adorn cakes for Chariot, which she describes as her “psychic pastry project”. 

“I love the contrast that a baked meringue has: shattery on the outside and pillowy on the inside,” says Monroe. Her dramatic Pavlovas are pure celebration food, whether piled high with sweet basil cream and chunky pink chains made from sugar or topped with what Monroe calls a “Creamsicle palette” of Alphonso mango curd and candied golden kiwis. Each bite is a study in textural juxtaposition, and the dessert as a whole is a visual showstopper. “People lose their minds when you bring out a six-foot [1.8-metre] Pavlova,” says Monroe. “It’s an opportunity to be sculptural and kitschy, a bit of Victorian silliness that I think speaks to this post-Marie Antoinette dessert moment we’re having.”

But meringue’s pleasures aren’t limited to aesthetic fantasy: it allows restaurants to use up extra egg whites left over from making yolky fresh pasta, aioli or custard-based ice creams. “It’s this beautiful canvas that’s also affordable for chefs,” says Schiff, noting that rising food costs and inflation are giving restaurants more reason to make the most of every ingredient. Fully baked for a Pavlova or Eton mess, meringue keeps in an airtight container for days, enabling easy assembly for kitchens without full-time pastry chefs. And as more home bakers gravitate towards an aesthetic that prioritises messy exuberance over careful piping, meringue-based dishes provide a dessert option that delights without demanding perfection. “It’s a lower-stakes, higher-chaos dessert,” says Monroe. “I’ve been slightly drunk assembling a Pavlova, and it went great. You can’t do that with a cake.” 

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During her childhood in Bangkok, the chef Rose Chalalai Singh recently recalled, the city seemed to be teeming with exotic blooms: there was the bounty of the flower market near the Chao Phraya River, the garlands of saffron-coloured marigolds at the city’s Buddhist temples. Later, as a teenager, she spent three years living on her great-uncle’s orchid farm in the canal-lined Thonburi neighbourhood. “Flowers have always been a part of my life,” she said. “After all, my name is Rose.”

When she moved to Europe and opened her first cafe in Paris, Ya Lamai, in 2009, flowers were harder to find, especially in winter. But still, she found them. For several years, she split her time between France and Majorca, where she fell in love with the blood red wild poppies that grow on the island; and on trips to Germany, she grew fond of the bright yellow fields of rapeseed that bloom there in the spring. Now based in Paris, Singh, 42, will often make a detour on spring walks from her apartment near the Jardin du Palais Royal to Rose Kitchen — the lively, intimate Thai restaurant she opened in the Marais in 2021 — to observe the progress of two flowering magnolia trees in the small square behind the Hôtel de Ville.

In early July, she was on a floral pilgrimage of a different sort, to Güldenhof, the farm outside of Berlin owned by her friend, the artist Danh Vo, 47. Her aim: to combine her love of flowers with her love of food by creating a meal for a group of friends using edible blossoms not as a garnish but as the main course. Since buying the 7.5-acre property — a former G.D.R. agricultural cooperative that includes four large dilapidated farm buildings — in 2016, Vo has transformed it into a commune meets Gesamtkunstwerk, installing bright red Isamu Noguchi “Play Sculptures” on the grounds and working with his collaborator Christine Schulz to establish vibrant gardens, including one devoted to flowers, which were in full bloom when Singh arrived. “It’s like a garden of fireworks,” she said, carrying a handwoven basket in which she was collecting a variety of brightly coloured blossoms, darting from bush to bush along with the bees.

Singh came to cooking through the art world. As a 17-year-old model in Bangkok, she met the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija at a party and they connected over their shared passion for food. Tiravanija’s grandmother was a popular caterer and cookbook author, and he is known for incorporating food into his work, sometimes serving curry to guests at his exhibitions. Over the years, as Singh developed her repertoire, honing her take on elevated Thai home cooking, Tiravanija introduced her to his artist friends, including Vo. It was Tiravanija, too, who suggested that Vo buy a property outside of Berlin to use as a space for storage and an archive. And Singh is now one of a network of friends, family, chefs and art world figures who visit the farm on weekends to wander the gardens, talk over meals in the open kitchen and, occasionally, dance in the attic of one of the outbuildings.

Vo designed the property to be, in part, a place for creative collaboration — there are wood workshops and a large kiln — and he encourages friends to engage with its bounty in new ways. When Singh stays, she likes to harvest and conserve whatever is in season, foraging for mushrooms, making jam from the fruit she collects or drying herbs for tea. But eating flowers was a relatively new idea that had been born one evening this past spring. Singh was cooking with the Basque chef Dani Lasa in San Sebastián, Spain, and noticed that one of the dishes was garnished with a fried acacia flower. Her friend the French perfumer Barnabé Fillion mentioned that he knew someone who had used acacia blossoms in a tempura dish. And then a month later Singh went to visit Vo’s farm and saw that the road to the property was lined with blooming acacia trees. “I opened the window and the car was filled with the scent of them,” she recalled. Once she arrived, she and Vo immediately started collecting the flowers. “I wanted to make jam and try eating them,” she said. “Then I decided to make tempura.” It ended up being so delicious — “It tastes a little like popcorn,” she said — that when Singh’s friend the photographer Juergen Teller had an exhibition in Berlin recently, she served the dish at the opening. Since that evening, Singh has continued to experiment with flowers as food, recording the dried blooms she uses in a journal.

After filling her basket, Singh made her way to the kitchen and started to dip each blossom carefully into a mixture of eggs, flour and water before placing it into a large wok spitting with oil. First, she fried a bunch of acacia flowers, then some zucchini blossoms and coriander flowers with the stems attached. She finished with green borage leaves, brilliant orange nasturtiums and deep purple pansies. She explained that each has a different texture and flavour (borage tastes something like oysters, calendula is peppery). She noted, as she arranged the flowers in clusters on a large white ceramic platter, that she wouldn’t cook with blooms that haven’t been grown by Vo or other friends. The flower industry is not known for its environmental consciousness. Plus at Güldenhof, she said, “all your senses are activated in such a pleasurable way all the time. Somehow that energy manifests in the flowers and vegetables this land produces.”

An hour later, the flower tempura was served family style on a wooden table outside the main farmhouse, along with steamed rice and a freshly picked salad of mixed greens. The Berlin-based artist and classical musician Ayumi Paul, the godmother of Singh’s son, Gabriel, was seated on a bench next to the German ceramist and restaurateur Oliver Prestel. (The evening before, Paul had played her violin accompanied by the chirping of Prestel’s pet Japanese bell crickets, which he had let loose in one of the outbuildings.) Singh was seated on the other side of the table between Fillion and Philip Adler, a farmer who works nearby and is a friend of Vo’s. He was taking a rare pause from the backbreaking summer schedule of harvesting vegetables. “Eating flowers is like going on vacation,” he said, explaining that the act of consuming blossoms was so fanciful it felt like being transported to an imaginary place. Singh, too, was on a high. “This project is making me feel so much happiness and excitement,” she said. “I feel like I am achieving something I’m meant to achieve.” Near the end of the meal, the guests raised a glass to her and toasted, “To the flower queen!”

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Billie Belo will never write “Happy Birthday” on her cakes.

As the baker behind New York City’s Cakes for No Occasion, she sees her offerings more as sculptures than comestible commodities: the tiered monstrosities ooze and drip. Her neon or pastel buttercream is often pocked with bulbous orbs that Belo doesn’t define as, say, truffles or cream puffs; in her decorating language, they’re simply balls, in flavours like lychee or raspberry, and they make her desserts seem not just alive but unwell.

After studying painting at New York’s Grand Central Atelier, she began baking for her friends’ restaurant in Hudson, New York, a few years ago, then started her online business — each one-of-a-kind cake is sold by email from her Manhattan apartment — in 2018 after refining an impasto style that betrays what she calls the “tight” Victorian look of traditional cakes, where lines are clean and excess icing is swept away. “There’s just so much caution in [that] realist style, and I felt imprisoned by it,” she says. “With cake, I want it to explode.”

Belo is part of a school of Instagram-native bakers espousing a messier, bespoke confectionary style: among them are the self-taught Brooklyn ceramist Alli Gelles, who launched Cakes4Sport last year to sell shimmering, swirling masses; Hannah Mandel, an archivist at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York, whose Forsythia Forsythia cakes are slightly less chaotic but still tend towards whimsical buttercream blobs, as well as pools of curd in tangy flavours like pineapple and blood orange; and Julie Saha, a vegan cheese affineur in Philadelphia, who, as @foodbebo, orients her practice less around finished products than her own spontaneous spirit of play, in which her cakes will change based on how she feels — rarely is the final product the same as the initial concept.

While aesthetically distinct, these bakers are unified not only in their zany, maximalist approaches but in their rejection of their discipline’s traditions, whether it’s the recent fondant-covered smoothness evangelised on TV by so-called (and often male) cake bosses, or the standard fare of the suburban bakery, where piped filigree and buttercream rosettes were popularised over the course of the 20th century. Nor are they making the naked cakes of recent rustic wedding dominance, with their carefully combed-away frosting perimeters — in fact, what most sets these new pastry chefs apart is their complete disavowal of neatness, which has defined American cake making since the first recipes migrated from France by way of English colonists in the late 1700s. Instead, these cakes allude to the millennial childhood aesthetic of Nickelodeon slime and neon signs, of brightly beaded anklets and painted macaroni necklaces; in that way, they reflect a kind of colourful, seemingly synthetic 1990s postmodernism that has likewise influenced many of today’s rising furniture and jewellery designers.

That veneer of silliness doesn’t mean, however, that these bakers shouldn’t be taken seriously. Though the cakes may seem at first glance like joyous follies, ready to topple under the weight of their own Rainbow Brite frosting, the women behind them say they’re rallying against nostalgia and perfection in part because there’s no use looking back, because things are neither clean nor ideal as a pandemic rages on and fires or floods overtake America’s coasts. We must still take sweetness where we can get it, of course, even if these cakes also provide a way of expressing rage at — and taking respite from — the uncertainty and disappointments of the modern world. And because these bakeries are all side jobs, they provide their owners a much- needed sense of control: “I’m not beholden to someone being like, ‘I want a cake that looks like Cookie Monster,’ ” says Mandel, “because I get to curate what I make.”

Ultimately, though, a cake’s appeal rests in its ephemerality — that moment before it’s cut into and forever destroyed — particularly at a time when young artists in all mediums are reckoning with human consumption and the material waste their work may produce. “We’re still finding pottery from whatever BC,” Gelles says, discussing the crumply vases she also produces. “Am I just making more incredibly permanent trash?” Yet with her cakes — which she describes as “grotesque” — there’s no concern that they might outlast their maker or buyer, which is partly the idea. “It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day,” Belo says. “It’s going to be eaten, and it’s going to be good.”

A version of this article appears in print in our fifth edition, Page 58 of T Australia with the headline: “The Weirdness Is The Point”
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