By Judayah Murray | November 19, 2018

The sweet aroma of confectioners sugar and cocoa welcomed guests into the SoHo Art Gallery in Manhattan. A small, dreadheaded woman in a white apron stood nervously in a corner of the gallery, scanning the faces of each person who walked in. Their eyes wandered from wall to wall until a few landed on a painting of a black face with full lips and streaming tears outlined in white, framed by a gradient of neon teal in the center of the room, and then dropped to its carbon copy– apparently made from three different forms of sugar–sitting on a table in front of it.

“And you could just tell it just clicked. Like, ‘So that’s what she’s doing. That piece on the wall… she recreated that’,” said Evelyn Cooke, the woman who brought New York City its first ever Pastry Art Show. She only had three months to get it together, and one of those months was dedicated to creating its ten showpieces. With an event planner, a couple thousand dollars she saved from working, inspiration from some of her favorite artists and a vision that not everyone understood, Cooke used chocolate, pastillage, poured sugar and cake to recreate paintings and sculptures. And though she almost spent her last to make it happen, she wasn’t focused on the monetary return–She didn’t even sell the pieces after the show. They went home with their modeled-after artists. Her goal was to make people see food the way she does: as art.

The process to design the face piece called ‘Drip’, as Cooke described, was grueling. It took seven hours to form the facial features out of pastillage, a sugar that hardens in seconds. She had to be quick and precise, and when the pieces didn’t come out right, they were thrown into a growing pile called the ‘graveyard of failed features.’ The poured sugar that would cover the face took another four or five hours. She had to make sure the pastillage pieces didn’t slide out of place and that she was careful enough not to burn herself. The large discolored mark about the length of a pencil on her forearm suggests she wasn’t very successful in that endeavor. And after it all, she had to start over and do it all again.

“The first time, the color was too green,” she said.

“I admired the idea behind the show, it was so unique and not like anything I’ve ever been a part of during my art career”, said Nicole Trejos, the artist behind ‘Drip’. “Just the thought of a pastry chef recreating my art into something edible,” she paused, “excited doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

That creativity wasn’t just sparked out of nowhere. Cooke had a rather artistic childhood. Her parents signed her up for art classes around New York while she was growing up in Staten Island. As early as elementary school, she had several of her paintings shown in Snug Harbor, the Cooper Union and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. One particular portrait that she painted of an art teacher when she was 16 still hangs in Susan E. Wagner High School. The most difficult part about art, she believed, was finding a medium that spoke to her the most.

“So it could be pencil, it could be, um, you know, paint–oil paint–it could be charcoal, it could be, you know, a whole spectrum. There so many different mediums that are out there. But I never connected with any one of those until I found pastry,” Cooke said. “With pastry, I found a medium of art that I felt was true to me and it makes sense for me and there’s so much you can do with pastry that you can manipulate in the same way you can manipulate paint or that you can manipulate clay.”

But calling herself a pastry artist, rather than a chef or professional baker has always thrown people off. Many assume it’s just a haughty title, a ruse to make her stand out from her competition.

“I think it speaks more to who I am and what I hope to accomplish through pastry,” she said. “We love food and how it tastes, but there’s so many things you can do with food visually to express certain concepts, feelings, emotions that I feel like there’s still so much room to be explored.”

Pastry schools often embrace this type of innovation and artistry, like the Culinary Institute of America which offers an associates degree in baking and pastry arts. Nicole Beauregard, one of the admissions counselor who specifically handles prospective students living in New York says the program teaches everything from simple decorating techniques to actually constructing and sculpting things out of edible materials like cake. The International Culinary Center, where Cooke received her diploma in nine months of intensive night-school training, offers a Professional Pastry Arts program in which students are taught lessons in chocolate, sugar, puff pastry and cake. The final exam includes using every technique taught to create one large showpiece that has to be at least ten inches tall and five inches wide.

Evelyn is not by any means the first person to think of using pastries to build up something completely untraditional. Anyone invested into this sugary community online could name a youtuber like Yolanda Gampp from How to Cake It who built a huge following on making mundane things like a cheeseburger, a Thanksgiving turkey, an amputated leg and an enormous nail polish bottle out of cake, vanilla buttercream frosting and fondant.

But Cooke envisioned something bigger for herself. To her, the appreciation potential is lost when easier materials and methods are used.

“You can make a masterpiece out of fingerpaint. And if that’s your unique voice as an artist, you do that and you make the most of it,” she said. “But then, you have the artist that painted the Sistine Chapel.”

“People will look at, you know, Van Gogh or Picasso or the Mona Lisa, and they know at minimum that ‘this is a visual representation of a lot of work, a lot of effort–years of dedication, experience and building your craft’. And also, ‘I appreciate this as art. This is something of value to invest my money in. This is something to be revered and looked at’,” she said, “Whereas, I don’t think people look at cupcakes like that.”

When Evelyn watched each of the gallery guests have that individual ‘Aha’ moment, she was finally able to relax.

“People get it.”