Presentation Is Everything

OK, maybe not everything, but it's the little details like this that slay me every time. Soup is somehow a million times better when it has parsley flecks on it, even if you can barely taste them. Carrot cake is a whole different thing when the carrots have doggone googly eyes. GOOGLY EYES! How can you not love that? In the realm of good-looking food, I carry the biggest torch for beautiful dessert displays. Rows of colorful, sparkly, good-smelling, tooth-decaying delights just give me a stupid grin - even without eating them. Even just looking at creamy, pastel pictures of them.

Sometimes when I used to work downtown I would go into Whole Foods and gaze at the pastry case on my lunch break. It totally cheered me up no matter what. Tiny, perfect tarts with just enough room for three blueberries on top of each one, cupcakes topped with frosting snowmen and crystal sugar snow, cakes piped with flowers and vines, glossy lemon tarts, all in neat rows. Once a few years ago I was in the mall with my boyfriend, walking past the rainbow columns of jelly beans at the candy kiosk, and he squeezed my arm and murmured wistfully, "You look at that candy the way you look at me."

One of my other favorites is the display at Pambiche, tropical and decadent and whimsical - that is where these happy carrots live, among chocolate cigars, sugar parrots, pineapple upside-down cakes, candy dominos and huge halves of papaya, creamy orange with all their weird black shiny seeds. I imagine the dessert case coming to life at night after everybody leaves. The carrots jump off the cake and dance with the dominos, the cigars roll around and the parrots fly around the room. You would never know from looking at them perfectly still in there during the dinner rush, but if you look closely there are tell-tale crumbs on the stereo.

Photo courtesy of Autumn Peterson