Salad Cakes and Colorful Cookies

On your next birthday, you might want a salad cake. You could be contributing to your five to 10 recommended servings of fruits and vegetables and live a longer and healthier life. In Japan, “salad cakes” are the brain child of Japanese food stylist Mitsuki Moriyasu, who uses whole vegetables to make eating healthy cool and hip again, BuzzFeed reports.

The cakes are adorned  with delicate carrot tendrils and glazed in veggie-based frosting, and expect to experience an earthy taste when you take a bite. Some examples: Tofu isn’t sautéed in teriyaki sauce, but is instead blended with vegetables to create the “icing," and spongecake is made of soybean flour, and, in keeping with the theme, virtually sugar-free. Happy birthday.

Colorful Cakes and Cookies 

Breakfast cereals are dumping artificial colors.  It’s a shift toward a cleaner ingredient list, so why are we seeing more and more of the color spectrum in our cakes, cookies and even coffee? 

The Washington Post reports that last month, a Brooklyn shop selling rainbow bagels reported waits of four hours to purchase its neon creations. A polychromatic grilled cheese has lit up the Internet.  There are cake balls that look as if they’ve been made from Play-Doh.Tie-dyed waffles, psychedelic s'mores. Orange peels filled with every color of Jell-O. Multicolored cookie parfait.  The Post says that for makers of colorful icings and food dyes, it’s a pot of gold.

Wilton Brands, a Woodridge, Ill.-based manufacturer of cake decorating supplies and ingredients, sells 24 gel-based hues that can be used in icing and baked goods, and has been flooding its Instagram feed with ombré and rainbow-colored recipes for home cooks to try, like its candy curl rainbow cake and rainbow shot glasses. 

Take a look at Instagram: lots of colored food seem to be showcased.  Wilton says that in our photograph-everything era, the rainbow dishes seem like a form of visual one-upsmanship, with home cooks and professionals alike striving to make the most perfect-looking Crayola box of a cake.