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蛋糕装饰艺术

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Last month in her Beverly Hills, Calif., workshop, Elin Katz sculpted a sleek-lined black car and painted portraits of her customer and his fiancee.


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'This is a great medium to work with for likenesses,' she mused as she defined an eyelid crease with a palette knife. 'I don't know why other people don't use it more.' The medium in question: Buttercream frosting. Ms. Katz, co-owner of Rosebud Cakes, sculpts in cake, paints with buttercream, etches in fondant, airbrushes with food coloring and molds in chocolate.










This once-esoteric field has recently gained popularity through cake-decorating TV shows. Ms. Katz, who has been in the business for over 30 years, has maintained her position as a top innovator by integrating lights, stage-like backdrops, lifelike representations of cars, faces and human bodies, and other elements that help her achieve her goal of making cakes into 'performance art.'










Ms. Katz has made everything from a six-tiered, goth-style, unicorn-themed cake to a multitude of designer handbag and shoe confections. 'It's a Beverly Hills thing,' Ms. Katz explained. Her cakes cost from $300 to more than $4,000 for large, complex creations.










Last year, she made realistic representations of the naked bodies of artist Marina Abramovic and singer Deborah Harry for a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art gala. Servers cut into the flesh-colored icing to reveal bloody-hued red velvet cake.










'At first, I thought they were supposed to be dead. I thought, 'Oh, cool, I can go study dead bodies at the morgue,'' said Ms. Katz. Instead, to get a lifelike look, she traced her daughter's body and made molds of her hands and feet in order to create accurate white-chocolate extremities.










After Ms. Katz, 57, left art school and moved to California from Illinois in 1978, she wondered how to make a living. A part-time job in a bakery got her thinking about cake design. Then she attended an exhibit by the artist Red Grooms and was struck by the possibilities of his whimsical dioramas.










'I thought, 'I could make cakes like that,'' and she started her business.










Ms. Katz always attacks a project with a three-dimensional, theatrical vision. Last month, comedian Jeff Dunham ordered a Batman-themed groom's cake for his coming marriage. After downloading pictures of the Batcave online, Ms. Katz asked her head decorator, Cory Pohlman, to build a Batcave cake platform with a plywood base and curved Styrofoam walls, which Ms. Pohlman painted with pewter, blue and white frosting. They rigged the ceiling of the cave with tiny LED lights, covered by painted paper cones to look like stalactites.










'I always think of the background, foreground and the action,' Ms. Katz said. Though her husband, Alan, who handles operations, had sketched a picture early on in the process, Ms. Katz's mental image had changed by the time work began. She didn't create a new sketch. 'Once I get the image in my mind, I don't need to look at much for reference,' she said.










To learn about new tools, lights, paints and techniques, Ms. Katz moonlights about 30 days a year at Flix FX, a prop-and-effects-design outfit for film and television. She loves fixing things and 'figuring out how stuff works,' she said. She makes her own Halloween costumes -- usually something gory, such as last year's frozencorpse of a 19th-century Arctic explorer. She always learns something applicable to cakes from these projects, she said.










Work on Mr. Dunham's Batman confection began on a Saturday, when she sculpted the cake. As she worked, she glanced occasionally at a toy Batmobile Mr. Dunham had provided. She confidently whacked at the cake, pushing and mushing pieces of it in a flurry of movement. About 30 minutes later, she covered what was unmistakably a 2 1/2-by-4-foot version of the car with a base coat of frosting.










On Monday, she covered it with a layer of fondant, a sheet of sugar-based dough, and used a skewer and scalpel to etch details into the surface. On Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Katz finished portrait figurines of Mr. Dunham and his bride. She painted the Batmobile with vegetable oil, giving it a sheen, and used an airbrush to apply gold and pearl-colored powder. She pronounced the car, which looked astonishingly metallic and poised to drive off the platform, the best she'd ever made.










A colleaguepointed out that a Catwoman figurine lacked kitty-like ears. Ms. Katz looked flummoxed.










'But she's not supposed to be wearing a mask, and Catwoman's ears are on the mask,' Ms. Katz said.










'Come on, Elin. It's a cake,' Ms. Pohlman reminded her.










'Oh, right,' said Ms. Katz. She grabbed a small pastry bag and piped onto Catwoman a pointy pair of ears.





Katy McLaughlin


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