The internet is full of stuff. Much of it cake.

[shewhomust]

Some days you're looking for something on the internet, and every link ends in a blind alley; other days, you go from link to link, from page to page, and the road goes ever on. Of course it simply depends on which subjects interest the people who post things to the internet - but some of those subjects are unexpected.

I started from truepenny's post about gingerbread houses. One trail of links led me through the excesses of gingerbread architecture to the gingerbread White House itself.

Another plunges into the Highland Bakery of Atlanta Georgia, where the deranged genius that is Karen Portaleo sculpts cake into forms you never knew you wanted. Here, to start with, is the undersea gingerbread house (complete with octopus shingling the roof) that she made for the Georgia Aqquarium; and here's an armadillo (apparently you can't be a cake decorator in the south and not offer an armadillo). But why stop there? Here's a zombie leprechaun.

The leprechaun photo is included in a Flickr group: the Creepy Cakes pool. Because baking and photographing creepy cakes isn't an isolated aberration, enough people do it to warrant a group where they can post pictures of their eyeballs and ashtrays and severed heads...

Inevitably, by now I was wondering, why don't they make puffin cakes? So I searched, and of course, they do. The sequence from Jen's Cakery has a lot of charm; I like this detail, with the puffin taking off from the side of the cake. But my favourite (from an admittedly small selection) is this one, made by the Cake Engineer.

It featured on Puffinpalooza, a wonderful source of puffin pictures (for which I have set up a feed at puffinpalooza, though I'm not sure that it's working). Poking around the archives there I found a photo of a horned puffin, a North American variant I hadn't previously encountered - and looking for more information, discovered that another member of the family is the Rhinoceros Auklet. Wikipedia has a picture of a baby Rhinoceros Auklet: I can't top that. Time for bed.

Comments

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Holee crap, some of those works of art are AMAZING. I gotta admit, though, the zombie leprechaun um, took the cake.

And I am reminded that I do not have enough time in the day to do all the fun things I want to. Making and decorating fun cakes would be such a great thing to do in my copious spare time. ;-/