SHORT ORDERS : Gusto : The Buffalo News
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Friday, June 19, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Cupcakes Takes The Cake Interview!
I'm posting it here...the answers to a great interview that Rachel Kraemer Bussel from Cupcakes Take the Cake Blogspot asked. She'll post them too, but I thought it might be interesting for some of you with questions about our experience in DC this past weekend! More on that later! Enjoy.
How did you get chosen to create this art installation, and how much time did you have to prepare? Whose idea was it to pair Lincoln and Obama?
After all of the positive feedback from my first cupcake portrait of Obama, I started imagining a bigger one for the Inauguration. Everything starts with imagination (see my tagline!). I went online and found out that the theme of his Inauguration was “A New Birth of Freedom,” which is a line taken from the Gettysburg Address. I’m from Illinois, and incredibly proud of these two men, so the pairing worked for me.
I designed the piece originally for the Inauguration, but I could not get anyone in politics to return my emails. I even emailed Shepard Fairey to see if he wanted to collaborate with me on the image! I also applied to march in the parade with the cupcakes, and I was not chosen, but at least they responded with a letter and a phone call. Finally one afternoon in late November I decided to go back to my roots and email all of the art museums in DC. The Smithsonian American Art Museum sent me an email response which sat deeply buried in my spam folder for 5 days. Thankfully, Katie Crooks from the museum followed up with a phone call and asked for a formal proposal. They were intrigued with the project and wanted to see if we could make it work! I sent them a 7 page proposal on December 8th, and they were very excited about the details. They felt it would be just as good—even better—for their Presidential Family Fun Day that they host in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery.
We felt the image still worked for President’s Day, especially since it was two days after the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Did you know that the Smithsonian American Art Museum was the site for Lincoln’s second Inaugural Ball? And the place was trashed with food all over the place by the end of the night! We did much better getting the cupcake liners into the garbage! It turns out, however, that the pairing is a hot-button topic for some. Of the thousands of live people I met, no one voiced dissent. From the 100 or so comments on threads following articles on the NPR site and the NYT site, about 50% of the comments were negative, due to the subject matter. Interesting how the negative people stay home to type about the positive experiences all the rest of us are having!!!!
Tell us about the actual process of preparing the installation and the making of the cupcakes. How did you choose the images of Obama and Lincoln? Did you have to get any special permission legally to use those images?
Wow, that’s a small novel in itself! I started actively planning and purchasing supplies a month in advance. I had to buy 40 tubs at Target and 240 aluminum pans at the grocery store! We made 120 lbs. of fondant over that month, 40 lbs. at a time. I figured out all of my mathematical calculations: how many circles we needed total, how many in each color/shade, what the mathematical formula was for each shade, etc. For instance, we needed 1200 of the darkest black/brown circles, which was 25% black and 75% brown, using over 12 pounds of fondant. I designed the gridding and organizational system, and then I tried to anticipate how much labor I would need. I sent an email to all of my staff asking them to pick up extra shifts. Two weeks before the exhibit we rolled all of the circles, and we kept them from drying out by placing them in aluminum pans between sheets of plastic wrap, all labeled well and placed in huge ziplock bags with a moist papertowel. We blew through this stage of the project in less time than we expected!
We started the baking on Saturday the 7th, 1 week before the installation. We kept everything well wrapped for freshness, and we froze the cupcakes for the first three days so they would last. We used huge piping bags filled with batter to pipe the cupcakes, and we lost about 15% of our product because they were too large, small, underbaked, overbaked, etc. This means we actually baked about 7,000 cupcakes. We baked in two convection ovens with a total of 10 sheet trays, so we could bake 480 at a time. After they had cooled, we filled them with Italian meringue buttercream: vanilla for Abe and the flag and chocolate for Obama.
While overseeing that process, I was in the back room of the bakery putting circles on cupcakes 6 pans at a time. 24 cupcakes fit in an aluminum baking pan; 6 pans fit into a sterilite tub, and I carefully labeled each tray and tub as I completed it. At first I thought I’d do all the circle placing myself. Ha! By the end I think it took 8 different people working on that to finish it. It’s the most time consuming part, and you have to try to catch your mistakes as you go.;
As for the images, to begin, I did a Google Image Search of Lincoln. I chose the picture I liked best of him, which luckily was taken 2 weeks before the Gettysburg address, so it was perfect thematically. The photo was taken in 1863 by Alexander Gardener. It is so old that it is public domain. For the companion Obama picture, I looked for an image that literally balanced the Lincoln picture. I found the photo on TheMavenReport blog, and asked them to advise me on the authorship of the picture. They didn’t respond. I figured I was within Fair Use Copyright Law, so I proceeded. I may have been within Fair Use, but when I heard about the hooplah with Shepard Fairey and AP, I got nervous. It was the same day I got my contract from the Smithsonian, so I was really feeling the weight of what I was about to do. I decided I should spend a little more time figuring out who the Obama image belonged to.
After just a few minutes on Google, I found the upcoming image for the March issue of Vanity Fair. Once glance at it and I just knew. I had used an Annie Leibovitz photo. I could tell by the quality of the image, and by the intimacy of the connection between photographer and subject. It figures, as I have been a huge Leibovitz fan for over 2 decades. She has an incredible gift. And I was already chest deep in cupcakes with all the fondant circles complete when I made this discovery!
Very quickly, I went to her Wikipedia page, and then found the page of the company Contact Press Images that represents her work. I called them, they told me who to email, and I proceeded to write an email in which I just put my heart on my sleeve. It was Friday evening a week before I would install the piece. I didn’t sweat it over the weekend, because it was out of my hands. I knew I had done the right thing. On Monday morning at 9am sharp I followed up with a phone call. Jeff Smith called me back about 30 minutes later. “This is weird,” he said. “This is cool. Did the Smithsonian ask you to do it?” After a few more minutes of conversation he said “Sure we’ll do it.” What an amazing gift!
What kind of planning did you do to figure out how many cupcakes you needed of each color to recreate the images? Exactly how many cupcakes did you wind up using?
First, I worked with my friend and uber-designer Shasti O’Leary Soudant of SOS Creative. She has a slicker production design background than I do, so we collaborated on the composition. I work in Photoshop to reduce the image to large pixels; I run filters to begin to divide it into values and then I play with the colors and shades. You can grid an image by hand and do this process with your own computer (i.e. your brain!) but it takes much longer. I am lazy, so I use Photoshop. Once we have an image we like, we make color separations and count by hand how many circles we need of each color. Then we do the calculations mentioned above to mix the colors in correct amounts and in correct relation to each other. All I have to say is MATH, MATH, MATH, AND ONCE AGAIN MATH!
The piece was 97 cupcakes wide by 61 cupcakes tall which comes to exactly 5,917 cupcakes. If you baked 2 dozen in your home oven every week day for a year (taking Saturday and Sunday off) you would have just over 6,000 cupcakes. That’s a lot of cupcakes!
How long did it take to set it up, and how many people did you have helping you?
Once we had done all of the organizing and placing of the circles, putting the piece together is the easy part! We unloaded on Friday morning at 9am, and then about 6 of us worked on putting the circles on the last 1/3 of the cupcakes.
At 2pm we began the installation. I noticed right away that I had made a small mistake; the two groups on the Obama side of the image had to work in reverse alphabetical order on their trays. We fixed that without too much effort. We had 8 people (plus me makes 9) installing: One cupcake placer per quadrant, and one “unwrapper/organizer.” It was a good system.
We would have been done in 4 hours if it weren’t for the third eye we gave Obama toward the end. Apparently I had finished a set of 6 trays at 2 in the morning on Tuesday, and I labeled it wrong. The next morning I did the same set over again, labeled it correctly, but couldn’t get the sense of de ja vu out of my head! The mistake became clear to the people watching the live feed video before it became clear to us! When you are down in the middle of it you can’t really get a sense of the full image. Once I realized what was happening, it was easy enough to pull out the offending set and replace them, thanks to my plan and all of the back-up materials I brought. Never install a cake—any cake—much less something of this scale without back-ups!
As a result, I think we finished in about 4 hours. We were very, very pleased with the result, and very relieved that it went so smoothly. I wasn’t sorry about the mistake at all; I felt like it showed that this is a human endeavor, and I thought it highlighted the problem-solving process. If it went off without a hitch, it would have seemed too easy. It was not easy. The planning and organizing was as big a part of the effort as the image making and baking put together! After being an art teacher for 15 years, organizing a project is my specialty. I think those skills were really vital here!
What kinds of cupcakes/filling did you use, and why did you choose those specific recipes?
Originally I wanted to make Obama from chocolate cake, Lincoln from the Mary Todd recipe that was his favorite; yellow cake for the white stripes; and red velvet for the red stripes. Unfortunately, we did some trial runs, and all of the different kinds baked up in different shapes. On a large scale like this, differences of 1/8 inch can translate into trouble with the grid and the image. Also, I had enough variables to deal with without adding in buttermilk, cocoa powder, etc. And cost was definitely an issue that had us leaning toward simplicity with the recipes. Not to mention insurance, liability, food allergies, etc. I played it as safe as I could.
I did break out a little on the filling! I love cupcakes with Italian meringue buttercream, so I treated everyone by filling all of the cupcakes with our own special recipe. It belongs to Dolci bakery in Buffalo, so I can’t share it here, but there are many recipes out there and they all work. I also like swiss meringue buttercream. Try Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible for some excellent recipes! For a chocolate version, you can add bittersweet melted chocolate to the vanilla buttercream and it is simply awesome! I filled Obama with chocolate!
As for my yellow cake, sorry, that’s classified!
You make your own fondant; can you tell us more about what kind of ingredients you use and why?
Most people think they can’t stand fondant, but what they can’t stand is most of the commercially made fondant that is available! It smells and tastes more like chemicals than food, and it has a bizarre texture in the mouth. I make my own using a slightly adapted recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Cake Bible.” I use her variation that uses corn syrup instead of glucose, because it is cheaper and I don’t have to run to Michael’s every minute. I order glycerine in large bottles from Country Kitchen Sweet Art for the same reason. I like the way this fondant tastes—mostly just sweet—because it is probably 95% powdered sugar.
I mix the fondant in my 60 quart Hobart mixer 40 lbs. at a time, but you can do a single batch in your Kitchenaid Mixer with the dough hook, or you can mix it by hand. It requires a lot of kneading, and I recommend that you warm it up often in the microwave to make it pliable. My only complaint about the recipe is that it can be difficult to work with the final product. It gets crumbly quickly. We did some experiments and discovered that if you add just 5% of Wilton gumpaste to your fondant, it keeps it much more pliable! So, for every 5 pounds of fondant, add 4 ounces of gumpaste. Or, for 1 ¼ pounds fondant, use 1 ounce gumpaste. Knead it in well, wrap it with plastic, and keep it in an airtight container.
The other reason I like this fondant, besides the fact that it actually tastes like food, is that it holds up better. We tried Satin Ice fondant, but if any moisture got on the circles at all, they melted into sticky puddles! My fondant is a little heartier, and it withstood the two weeks of packaging without any problems! More tips: roll it out with cornstarch, and add shortening every time you knead the scraps back together!
Did you do any trial runs to make sure the piece would come out theway you'd envisioned?
We did LOTS of trial runs! We tried out 5 different liners, we tried filling them to different heights, we tried different baking pans, and we tried different recipes. Every different variable made a difference! Once I had chosen my liners, pans, and recipe, then I chose the size circle cutters I would use: 1 7/8 inch to be exact. Then I could have the bases made to the correct specs! Again, MATH! But anyone who doesn’t think there is math involved in baking is in denial! It’s just yummy chemistry, that’s all!
All the cupcakes were made in Buffalo and transported to Washington,DC. How did you accomplish that while keeping them intact?
We made the cupcakes over the span of 5 days, wrapping them and refrigerating or freezing as needed. To keep them from getting beaten up, we used aluminum pans that were taller than the actual cupcakes, and we “snuggled” them into the pans with plastic wrap to help them stay put. We then labeled each pan, wrapped it with plastic wrap, and used ¼ sheet cake boards between stacks of three so they wouldn’t squish down. Two stacks of three pans, for a total of 6, fit in each Sterilite tub. We had 40 tubs to fill, and they all had their own labels, too. I had a hitch put on my mini van and we rented a 5x8 U-Haul trailer to drag them all down to DC! It was bad weather when we left Buffalo, so we kept our fingers crossed that out little lovelies would make it without winding up in a ditch somewhere in Pennsylvania! We arrived in DC at 2:30 am after an 11 hour drive. It was epic. We were travelling with 3 children, 3 assistants, my husband, one car, one minivan and one trailer. What an adventure!
What kinds of reactions did you get from the crowd?
Everyone I met over the course of the two days was amazing. AMAZING! There was so much support, and good will, and excitement! The visitors who saw the piece had wonderful questions and comments to make. The one I heard the most was “How did you think of doing this?” If the subject matter or materials of the piece bothered anyone, I didn’t hear about it. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive!
Maybe all of the negative folks stayed home to type on threads about the real experiences the rest of us are having. Really, they should get out more and eat some cupcakes. It’s hard to be snarky when someone is handing you a free cupcake with a big smile on their face!
I have never heard more people in one place say “please” and “thank you.” There were lots of requests for a blue cupcake with a star, since there were only 50 of those. People figured out they were special. Also, as a side note, when I took cupcakes to the soup kitchen the next day to serve them, I heard the same thing: “May I have another, please? A red one this time?” And always “Thank you.” I think this piece gave you a chance to let your inner child out, if you still have one. I got a wonderful email from a viewer who is a musician who was there with her scientist husband confirming just that.
What was it like to have the project broadcast live over the Internet?
That was a pretty amazing experience! I knew they were going to do a time-lapse video of the installation and de-installation, but I didn’t know about the live broadcast until they asked me how I felt about being “miked” the whole time. If you hadn’t guessed, I am not a shy nor a private person, so I agreed to do it. I have been an art teacher since my early 20’s and I’m a mother of 2 small children now, so I have a pretty good filter! I had to keep reminding others around me that they could be heard by the mike, too!
Later, when we were done, to find out that 20,000 people had tuned in at some point or another was mind blowing. I hope listening to the process and to the answers of viewers questions added another layer. It was really cool to check my Face Book page later and see comments that let me know someone had been listening. I was surprised at the negative comments about my voice, and the assumptions some people made about why I sound the way I do. I had a very serious injury almost 12 years ago, and I have a voice disorder as a result. It’s called disphonia, which basically means I sound like I have laryngitis. Some people think I am sick and they don’t like it that I am working with food.
Is there a political and/or patriotic element to the piece, and how do cupcakes specifically fit in?
There is absolutely a patriotic element to the piece! In my artist statement, I wrote:
Today’s installation celebrates the Inauguration of President Barack Obama just a few weeks ago and the 200th Anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth just a few days ago. These two men have been compared of late for more than just their early careers as lawyers from Illinois.
I created this dual portrait with the belief that the vision of a single person, gifted with the ability to lead, can change our world for the better. Rarely do individuals come about who have an absolute belief in the need for a fair and just government, and the skills to speak and motivate others to act on that belief. Obama and Lincoln are both cut from that cloth. My pride in them and in our country for electing them is immense. My gratitude for the changes they represent is deep. And my awe at the size of the tasks they face(d) is immeasurable.
There is also a personal element to the pairing for me. On the NYT blog “The Caucus” there was an article about my piece entitled “The Tastiest Obama/Lincoln Comparison Ever.” I wrote this in response to many of the comments there:
I am intrigued with the conversation this has sparked (or just added fuel to) about the worthiness or worthlessness of comparing Obama and Lincoln. Everyone brings their own agenda to the viewing of any artwork, so none of you are wrong. However, as an artist, I work from my heart and my experience. My reason for connecting the two is very personal.
When Lincoln was president, my ancestors lived in Atlanta and owned slaves. This is a source of great shame for me. Fortunately, I was raised by two liberal parents in a suburb of Chicago. They taught me to value people for what is within and to celebrate our differences rather than shun them. My priority as a parent is to raise my children to continue to celebrate diversity in all of its forms.
We chose our neighborhood based on its diversity. We chose their school based on its diversity. They describe people by the way they act, or by the color of the shirt they are wearing, but not by the color of their skin.
Thus, the Inauguration of Obama and the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth was a personal celebration for this liberal daughter of Illinois. Our family has come a long way since the 1800s. We have a long way to go. Thank god there are intelligent people willing to lead the charge. I baked them some cupcakes. I shared them with a lot of happy people. None went to waste. It felt really good! It’s as simple as that.
How do cupcakes fit in? They are quintessentially American. They carry their own connotation as a material. And they evoke an emotional response from the viewer. Also, because it’s made out of food, this piece engages all 5 senses. When we uncovered it Saturday morning, this incredible wave of yummy cupcake aroma wafted out and around the gallery. Visually, the cupcakes work on a number of levels. The further away you get from the piece, the more readable the image is. It is especially readable through a camera lens or in a photograph. But I personally love the piece up close. I love the imperfect surface of the image. Each cupcake tilts and leans and has its own character. The subtle shading of the fondant becomes more apparent. They are very satisfying individual “units” to work with!
How was this experience similar to and different from the1,240-cupcake Obama art installation you made just prior to the election?
It’s funny, the pictures of the new piece make the original 1200+ cupcake image look small! They were similar because it is the same process, essentially, that I worked with in the image making, the baking, and the transporting processes. I vastly improved my organizational system for the second one, and thank goodness! The first one I made at home over 5 days with the help of one friend. We worked a total of about 40 hours. This one took access to a commercial kitchen, months of planning, a whole lot more paperwork (i.e. contracts, insurance, etc.) and about 300 hours of labor spread amongst 14 people by the end of it all. And remember, I only have 3 employees! By the end, I had 6 employees, a few interns, and a whole smattering of volunteers. When you do something this scale it is bigger than you, and you have to have a team mentality. That’s one of the things about it that is so satisfying!
Have you had any official word from the Obama Administration about the piece?
Nope.
Do you have any plans for future cupcake art installations? Who else would you like to see recreated in cupcakes?
The press in England is really into these portraits, so I’d like to go to Buckingham Palace and do a portrait of the Queen.
More seriously, I have donated a LOT of my time and resources on these projects. Now I need to find some private commissions and/or collaborations with corporate sponsorship. I’ll be contacting art museums, movie and music production companies, and huge party planners to try to drum up some interest. Can’t you see something even bigger in Vegas? Yah baby!
Also, the next cupcake installation doesn’t have to be a portrait. Anything image we can import into Adobe Photoshop can become a cupcake installation. The possibilities are endless, just constrained by the size of the display space and the budget of the patron!
One thing I am imagining is doing something a bit smaller with a more layered surface. You know, adding appliqué and piping and hand-painting to the image. I might do that on square cookies. Will you still love me, CTTC?
Your bakery, Zillycakes, is set to open in Buffalo in May. Can you tell us what to expect from it?
Ah, but I’m not a bakery…I’m a custom cake studio. All of the baking happens down the street at Dolci bakery. We’ll be doing 5 things. You can read details about all of them on my website at http://www.zillycakes.com/:
We make custom cakes for weddings, birthdays, etc. You can watch us work from the street or from inside the shop, just like on Food Network, but live!
We offer classes in cake design one night a week, and we have an open studio night another night where you can come in to work and use our tools.
We have a cupcake bar, where you choose your cake, your frosting, and your topping and we make it up right there. Fun, right?
We have a small retail section with a beautifully crafted line of mini stacked cakes, cut out cookies, and other small treats to give as gifts.
We design cake events and installations, such as the cupcake portraits you have seen.
The backs of your t-shirts say, "Feed your imagination." What does that phrase mean to you?
The short answer to that is this: If you can imagine it, we can make it from cake, and it will feed and delight your guests!
The long answer is this: I am an educator; I (almost) have a Masters in Art in Teaching Art Education K-12. I have taught art for 20 years. I believe as human beings our greatest gift is our imagination. I see it present in all children. If we nurture it—if we feed it—it grows. If it is starved, it eventually shrivels up and disappears.
It’s our job as a species to continue to feed the imagination of our children. It’s the only way we’ll survive. The first step toward solving any problem begins in the imagination. If you can imagine something, then it’s just a matter of logistics to bring it to fruition.
How do we feed it? Stop saying “no” to every idea that pops into your head. Say “what if” more often. Buy a journal or a sketch book and write down your ideas. Brainstorm with friends. Don’t be afraid to take a risk or ask for help. These are things that help me keep my own imagination fed and I’ve seen it work with my students, too.
I could stay up on this soap box and go on and on, but this is a cupcake blog, so I’ll stop there. Make stuff. Keep making stuff. Tell your kids it’s cool to make stuff. ‘Nuff said.
What are you working on in the meantime?
Cleaning up my wreck of a house!
(That’s my big agenda for this week)
Then in March, I have sketches to make for my 09 brides, tastings to schedule, and a whole shop to build out in March and April! I’ve got my hands full!
How did you get chosen to create this art installation, and how much time did you have to prepare? Whose idea was it to pair Lincoln and Obama?
After all of the positive feedback from my first cupcake portrait of Obama, I started imagining a bigger one for the Inauguration. Everything starts with imagination (see my tagline!). I went online and found out that the theme of his Inauguration was “A New Birth of Freedom,” which is a line taken from the Gettysburg Address. I’m from Illinois, and incredibly proud of these two men, so the pairing worked for me.
I designed the piece originally for the Inauguration, but I could not get anyone in politics to return my emails. I even emailed Shepard Fairey to see if he wanted to collaborate with me on the image! I also applied to march in the parade with the cupcakes, and I was not chosen, but at least they responded with a letter and a phone call. Finally one afternoon in late November I decided to go back to my roots and email all of the art museums in DC. The Smithsonian American Art Museum sent me an email response which sat deeply buried in my spam folder for 5 days. Thankfully, Katie Crooks from the museum followed up with a phone call and asked for a formal proposal. They were intrigued with the project and wanted to see if we could make it work! I sent them a 7 page proposal on December 8th, and they were very excited about the details. They felt it would be just as good—even better—for their Presidential Family Fun Day that they host in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery.
We felt the image still worked for President’s Day, especially since it was two days after the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Did you know that the Smithsonian American Art Museum was the site for Lincoln’s second Inaugural Ball? And the place was trashed with food all over the place by the end of the night! We did much better getting the cupcake liners into the garbage! It turns out, however, that the pairing is a hot-button topic for some. Of the thousands of live people I met, no one voiced dissent. From the 100 or so comments on threads following articles on the NPR site and the NYT site, about 50% of the comments were negative, due to the subject matter. Interesting how the negative people stay home to type about the positive experiences all the rest of us are having!!!!
Tell us about the actual process of preparing the installation and the making of the cupcakes. How did you choose the images of Obama and Lincoln? Did you have to get any special permission legally to use those images?
Wow, that’s a small novel in itself! I started actively planning and purchasing supplies a month in advance. I had to buy 40 tubs at Target and 240 aluminum pans at the grocery store! We made 120 lbs. of fondant over that month, 40 lbs. at a time. I figured out all of my mathematical calculations: how many circles we needed total, how many in each color/shade, what the mathematical formula was for each shade, etc. For instance, we needed 1200 of the darkest black/brown circles, which was 25% black and 75% brown, using over 12 pounds of fondant. I designed the gridding and organizational system, and then I tried to anticipate how much labor I would need. I sent an email to all of my staff asking them to pick up extra shifts. Two weeks before the exhibit we rolled all of the circles, and we kept them from drying out by placing them in aluminum pans between sheets of plastic wrap, all labeled well and placed in huge ziplock bags with a moist papertowel. We blew through this stage of the project in less time than we expected!
We started the baking on Saturday the 7th, 1 week before the installation. We kept everything well wrapped for freshness, and we froze the cupcakes for the first three days so they would last. We used huge piping bags filled with batter to pipe the cupcakes, and we lost about 15% of our product because they were too large, small, underbaked, overbaked, etc. This means we actually baked about 7,000 cupcakes. We baked in two convection ovens with a total of 10 sheet trays, so we could bake 480 at a time. After they had cooled, we filled them with Italian meringue buttercream: vanilla for Abe and the flag and chocolate for Obama.
While overseeing that process, I was in the back room of the bakery putting circles on cupcakes 6 pans at a time. 24 cupcakes fit in an aluminum baking pan; 6 pans fit into a sterilite tub, and I carefully labeled each tray and tub as I completed it. At first I thought I’d do all the circle placing myself. Ha! By the end I think it took 8 different people working on that to finish it. It’s the most time consuming part, and you have to try to catch your mistakes as you go.;
As for the images, to begin, I did a Google Image Search of Lincoln. I chose the picture I liked best of him, which luckily was taken 2 weeks before the Gettysburg address, so it was perfect thematically. The photo was taken in 1863 by Alexander Gardener. It is so old that it is public domain. For the companion Obama picture, I looked for an image that literally balanced the Lincoln picture. I found the photo on TheMavenReport blog, and asked them to advise me on the authorship of the picture. They didn’t respond. I figured I was within Fair Use Copyright Law, so I proceeded. I may have been within Fair Use, but when I heard about the hooplah with Shepard Fairey and AP, I got nervous. It was the same day I got my contract from the Smithsonian, so I was really feeling the weight of what I was about to do. I decided I should spend a little more time figuring out who the Obama image belonged to.
After just a few minutes on Google, I found the upcoming image for the March issue of Vanity Fair. Once glance at it and I just knew. I had used an Annie Leibovitz photo. I could tell by the quality of the image, and by the intimacy of the connection between photographer and subject. It figures, as I have been a huge Leibovitz fan for over 2 decades. She has an incredible gift. And I was already chest deep in cupcakes with all the fondant circles complete when I made this discovery!
Very quickly, I went to her Wikipedia page, and then found the page of the company Contact Press Images that represents her work. I called them, they told me who to email, and I proceeded to write an email in which I just put my heart on my sleeve. It was Friday evening a week before I would install the piece. I didn’t sweat it over the weekend, because it was out of my hands. I knew I had done the right thing. On Monday morning at 9am sharp I followed up with a phone call. Jeff Smith called me back about 30 minutes later. “This is weird,” he said. “This is cool. Did the Smithsonian ask you to do it?” After a few more minutes of conversation he said “Sure we’ll do it.” What an amazing gift!
What kind of planning did you do to figure out how many cupcakes you needed of each color to recreate the images? Exactly how many cupcakes did you wind up using?
First, I worked with my friend and uber-designer Shasti O’Leary Soudant of SOS Creative. She has a slicker production design background than I do, so we collaborated on the composition. I work in Photoshop to reduce the image to large pixels; I run filters to begin to divide it into values and then I play with the colors and shades. You can grid an image by hand and do this process with your own computer (i.e. your brain!) but it takes much longer. I am lazy, so I use Photoshop. Once we have an image we like, we make color separations and count by hand how many circles we need of each color. Then we do the calculations mentioned above to mix the colors in correct amounts and in correct relation to each other. All I have to say is MATH, MATH, MATH, AND ONCE AGAIN MATH!
The piece was 97 cupcakes wide by 61 cupcakes tall which comes to exactly 5,917 cupcakes. If you baked 2 dozen in your home oven every week day for a year (taking Saturday and Sunday off) you would have just over 6,000 cupcakes. That’s a lot of cupcakes!
How long did it take to set it up, and how many people did you have helping you?
Once we had done all of the organizing and placing of the circles, putting the piece together is the easy part! We unloaded on Friday morning at 9am, and then about 6 of us worked on putting the circles on the last 1/3 of the cupcakes.
At 2pm we began the installation. I noticed right away that I had made a small mistake; the two groups on the Obama side of the image had to work in reverse alphabetical order on their trays. We fixed that without too much effort. We had 8 people (plus me makes 9) installing: One cupcake placer per quadrant, and one “unwrapper/organizer.” It was a good system.
We would have been done in 4 hours if it weren’t for the third eye we gave Obama toward the end. Apparently I had finished a set of 6 trays at 2 in the morning on Tuesday, and I labeled it wrong. The next morning I did the same set over again, labeled it correctly, but couldn’t get the sense of de ja vu out of my head! The mistake became clear to the people watching the live feed video before it became clear to us! When you are down in the middle of it you can’t really get a sense of the full image. Once I realized what was happening, it was easy enough to pull out the offending set and replace them, thanks to my plan and all of the back-up materials I brought. Never install a cake—any cake—much less something of this scale without back-ups!
As a result, I think we finished in about 4 hours. We were very, very pleased with the result, and very relieved that it went so smoothly. I wasn’t sorry about the mistake at all; I felt like it showed that this is a human endeavor, and I thought it highlighted the problem-solving process. If it went off without a hitch, it would have seemed too easy. It was not easy. The planning and organizing was as big a part of the effort as the image making and baking put together! After being an art teacher for 15 years, organizing a project is my specialty. I think those skills were really vital here!
What kinds of cupcakes/filling did you use, and why did you choose those specific recipes?
Originally I wanted to make Obama from chocolate cake, Lincoln from the Mary Todd recipe that was his favorite; yellow cake for the white stripes; and red velvet for the red stripes. Unfortunately, we did some trial runs, and all of the different kinds baked up in different shapes. On a large scale like this, differences of 1/8 inch can translate into trouble with the grid and the image. Also, I had enough variables to deal with without adding in buttermilk, cocoa powder, etc. And cost was definitely an issue that had us leaning toward simplicity with the recipes. Not to mention insurance, liability, food allergies, etc. I played it as safe as I could.
I did break out a little on the filling! I love cupcakes with Italian meringue buttercream, so I treated everyone by filling all of the cupcakes with our own special recipe. It belongs to Dolci bakery in Buffalo, so I can’t share it here, but there are many recipes out there and they all work. I also like swiss meringue buttercream. Try Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible for some excellent recipes! For a chocolate version, you can add bittersweet melted chocolate to the vanilla buttercream and it is simply awesome! I filled Obama with chocolate!
As for my yellow cake, sorry, that’s classified!
You make your own fondant; can you tell us more about what kind of ingredients you use and why?
Most people think they can’t stand fondant, but what they can’t stand is most of the commercially made fondant that is available! It smells and tastes more like chemicals than food, and it has a bizarre texture in the mouth. I make my own using a slightly adapted recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Cake Bible.” I use her variation that uses corn syrup instead of glucose, because it is cheaper and I don’t have to run to Michael’s every minute. I order glycerine in large bottles from Country Kitchen Sweet Art for the same reason. I like the way this fondant tastes—mostly just sweet—because it is probably 95% powdered sugar.
I mix the fondant in my 60 quart Hobart mixer 40 lbs. at a time, but you can do a single batch in your Kitchenaid Mixer with the dough hook, or you can mix it by hand. It requires a lot of kneading, and I recommend that you warm it up often in the microwave to make it pliable. My only complaint about the recipe is that it can be difficult to work with the final product. It gets crumbly quickly. We did some experiments and discovered that if you add just 5% of Wilton gumpaste to your fondant, it keeps it much more pliable! So, for every 5 pounds of fondant, add 4 ounces of gumpaste. Or, for 1 ¼ pounds fondant, use 1 ounce gumpaste. Knead it in well, wrap it with plastic, and keep it in an airtight container.
The other reason I like this fondant, besides the fact that it actually tastes like food, is that it holds up better. We tried Satin Ice fondant, but if any moisture got on the circles at all, they melted into sticky puddles! My fondant is a little heartier, and it withstood the two weeks of packaging without any problems! More tips: roll it out with cornstarch, and add shortening every time you knead the scraps back together!
Did you do any trial runs to make sure the piece would come out theway you'd envisioned?
We did LOTS of trial runs! We tried out 5 different liners, we tried filling them to different heights, we tried different baking pans, and we tried different recipes. Every different variable made a difference! Once I had chosen my liners, pans, and recipe, then I chose the size circle cutters I would use: 1 7/8 inch to be exact. Then I could have the bases made to the correct specs! Again, MATH! But anyone who doesn’t think there is math involved in baking is in denial! It’s just yummy chemistry, that’s all!
All the cupcakes were made in Buffalo and transported to Washington,DC. How did you accomplish that while keeping them intact?
We made the cupcakes over the span of 5 days, wrapping them and refrigerating or freezing as needed. To keep them from getting beaten up, we used aluminum pans that were taller than the actual cupcakes, and we “snuggled” them into the pans with plastic wrap to help them stay put. We then labeled each pan, wrapped it with plastic wrap, and used ¼ sheet cake boards between stacks of three so they wouldn’t squish down. Two stacks of three pans, for a total of 6, fit in each Sterilite tub. We had 40 tubs to fill, and they all had their own labels, too. I had a hitch put on my mini van and we rented a 5x8 U-Haul trailer to drag them all down to DC! It was bad weather when we left Buffalo, so we kept our fingers crossed that out little lovelies would make it without winding up in a ditch somewhere in Pennsylvania! We arrived in DC at 2:30 am after an 11 hour drive. It was epic. We were travelling with 3 children, 3 assistants, my husband, one car, one minivan and one trailer. What an adventure!
What kinds of reactions did you get from the crowd?
Everyone I met over the course of the two days was amazing. AMAZING! There was so much support, and good will, and excitement! The visitors who saw the piece had wonderful questions and comments to make. The one I heard the most was “How did you think of doing this?” If the subject matter or materials of the piece bothered anyone, I didn’t hear about it. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive!
Maybe all of the negative folks stayed home to type on threads about the real experiences the rest of us are having. Really, they should get out more and eat some cupcakes. It’s hard to be snarky when someone is handing you a free cupcake with a big smile on their face!
I have never heard more people in one place say “please” and “thank you.” There were lots of requests for a blue cupcake with a star, since there were only 50 of those. People figured out they were special. Also, as a side note, when I took cupcakes to the soup kitchen the next day to serve them, I heard the same thing: “May I have another, please? A red one this time?” And always “Thank you.” I think this piece gave you a chance to let your inner child out, if you still have one. I got a wonderful email from a viewer who is a musician who was there with her scientist husband confirming just that.
What was it like to have the project broadcast live over the Internet?
That was a pretty amazing experience! I knew they were going to do a time-lapse video of the installation and de-installation, but I didn’t know about the live broadcast until they asked me how I felt about being “miked” the whole time. If you hadn’t guessed, I am not a shy nor a private person, so I agreed to do it. I have been an art teacher since my early 20’s and I’m a mother of 2 small children now, so I have a pretty good filter! I had to keep reminding others around me that they could be heard by the mike, too!
Later, when we were done, to find out that 20,000 people had tuned in at some point or another was mind blowing. I hope listening to the process and to the answers of viewers questions added another layer. It was really cool to check my Face Book page later and see comments that let me know someone had been listening. I was surprised at the negative comments about my voice, and the assumptions some people made about why I sound the way I do. I had a very serious injury almost 12 years ago, and I have a voice disorder as a result. It’s called disphonia, which basically means I sound like I have laryngitis. Some people think I am sick and they don’t like it that I am working with food.
Is there a political and/or patriotic element to the piece, and how do cupcakes specifically fit in?
There is absolutely a patriotic element to the piece! In my artist statement, I wrote:
Today’s installation celebrates the Inauguration of President Barack Obama just a few weeks ago and the 200th Anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth just a few days ago. These two men have been compared of late for more than just their early careers as lawyers from Illinois.
I created this dual portrait with the belief that the vision of a single person, gifted with the ability to lead, can change our world for the better. Rarely do individuals come about who have an absolute belief in the need for a fair and just government, and the skills to speak and motivate others to act on that belief. Obama and Lincoln are both cut from that cloth. My pride in them and in our country for electing them is immense. My gratitude for the changes they represent is deep. And my awe at the size of the tasks they face(d) is immeasurable.
There is also a personal element to the pairing for me. On the NYT blog “The Caucus” there was an article about my piece entitled “The Tastiest Obama/Lincoln Comparison Ever.” I wrote this in response to many of the comments there:
I am intrigued with the conversation this has sparked (or just added fuel to) about the worthiness or worthlessness of comparing Obama and Lincoln. Everyone brings their own agenda to the viewing of any artwork, so none of you are wrong. However, as an artist, I work from my heart and my experience. My reason for connecting the two is very personal.
When Lincoln was president, my ancestors lived in Atlanta and owned slaves. This is a source of great shame for me. Fortunately, I was raised by two liberal parents in a suburb of Chicago. They taught me to value people for what is within and to celebrate our differences rather than shun them. My priority as a parent is to raise my children to continue to celebrate diversity in all of its forms.
We chose our neighborhood based on its diversity. We chose their school based on its diversity. They describe people by the way they act, or by the color of the shirt they are wearing, but not by the color of their skin.
Thus, the Inauguration of Obama and the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth was a personal celebration for this liberal daughter of Illinois. Our family has come a long way since the 1800s. We have a long way to go. Thank god there are intelligent people willing to lead the charge. I baked them some cupcakes. I shared them with a lot of happy people. None went to waste. It felt really good! It’s as simple as that.
How do cupcakes fit in? They are quintessentially American. They carry their own connotation as a material. And they evoke an emotional response from the viewer. Also, because it’s made out of food, this piece engages all 5 senses. When we uncovered it Saturday morning, this incredible wave of yummy cupcake aroma wafted out and around the gallery. Visually, the cupcakes work on a number of levels. The further away you get from the piece, the more readable the image is. It is especially readable through a camera lens or in a photograph. But I personally love the piece up close. I love the imperfect surface of the image. Each cupcake tilts and leans and has its own character. The subtle shading of the fondant becomes more apparent. They are very satisfying individual “units” to work with!
How was this experience similar to and different from the1,240-cupcake Obama art installation you made just prior to the election?
It’s funny, the pictures of the new piece make the original 1200+ cupcake image look small! They were similar because it is the same process, essentially, that I worked with in the image making, the baking, and the transporting processes. I vastly improved my organizational system for the second one, and thank goodness! The first one I made at home over 5 days with the help of one friend. We worked a total of about 40 hours. This one took access to a commercial kitchen, months of planning, a whole lot more paperwork (i.e. contracts, insurance, etc.) and about 300 hours of labor spread amongst 14 people by the end of it all. And remember, I only have 3 employees! By the end, I had 6 employees, a few interns, and a whole smattering of volunteers. When you do something this scale it is bigger than you, and you have to have a team mentality. That’s one of the things about it that is so satisfying!
Have you had any official word from the Obama Administration about the piece?
Nope.
Do you have any plans for future cupcake art installations? Who else would you like to see recreated in cupcakes?
The press in England is really into these portraits, so I’d like to go to Buckingham Palace and do a portrait of the Queen.
More seriously, I have donated a LOT of my time and resources on these projects. Now I need to find some private commissions and/or collaborations with corporate sponsorship. I’ll be contacting art museums, movie and music production companies, and huge party planners to try to drum up some interest. Can’t you see something even bigger in Vegas? Yah baby!
Also, the next cupcake installation doesn’t have to be a portrait. Anything image we can import into Adobe Photoshop can become a cupcake installation. The possibilities are endless, just constrained by the size of the display space and the budget of the patron!
One thing I am imagining is doing something a bit smaller with a more layered surface. You know, adding appliqué and piping and hand-painting to the image. I might do that on square cookies. Will you still love me, CTTC?
Your bakery, Zillycakes, is set to open in Buffalo in May. Can you tell us what to expect from it?
Ah, but I’m not a bakery…I’m a custom cake studio. All of the baking happens down the street at Dolci bakery. We’ll be doing 5 things. You can read details about all of them on my website at http://www.zillycakes.com/:
We make custom cakes for weddings, birthdays, etc. You can watch us work from the street or from inside the shop, just like on Food Network, but live!
We offer classes in cake design one night a week, and we have an open studio night another night where you can come in to work and use our tools.
We have a cupcake bar, where you choose your cake, your frosting, and your topping and we make it up right there. Fun, right?
We have a small retail section with a beautifully crafted line of mini stacked cakes, cut out cookies, and other small treats to give as gifts.
We design cake events and installations, such as the cupcake portraits you have seen.
The backs of your t-shirts say, "Feed your imagination." What does that phrase mean to you?
The short answer to that is this: If you can imagine it, we can make it from cake, and it will feed and delight your guests!
The long answer is this: I am an educator; I (almost) have a Masters in Art in Teaching Art Education K-12. I have taught art for 20 years. I believe as human beings our greatest gift is our imagination. I see it present in all children. If we nurture it—if we feed it—it grows. If it is starved, it eventually shrivels up and disappears.
It’s our job as a species to continue to feed the imagination of our children. It’s the only way we’ll survive. The first step toward solving any problem begins in the imagination. If you can imagine something, then it’s just a matter of logistics to bring it to fruition.
How do we feed it? Stop saying “no” to every idea that pops into your head. Say “what if” more often. Buy a journal or a sketch book and write down your ideas. Brainstorm with friends. Don’t be afraid to take a risk or ask for help. These are things that help me keep my own imagination fed and I’ve seen it work with my students, too.
I could stay up on this soap box and go on and on, but this is a cupcake blog, so I’ll stop there. Make stuff. Keep making stuff. Tell your kids it’s cool to make stuff. ‘Nuff said.
What are you working on in the meantime?
Cleaning up my wreck of a house!
(That’s my big agenda for this week)
Then in March, I have sketches to make for my 09 brides, tastings to schedule, and a whole shop to build out in March and April! I’ve got my hands full!
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
January 09 at Zillycakes
January news from Zillycakes: What a couple of weeks we are having, and it's only January!
I'm here to say that I'm grateful for employees, as we move into our 3rd week of creative madness here in Buffalo, New York. We are still working out of my house and Dolci bakery as we wait on building permits from City Hall (now 3 months and still waiting!). We are making custom cakes, preparing for the Smithsonian American Art musuem project on Feb. 14th, and working on product development for our retail line. I am hopping with all of the wedding tastings that are being scheduled...proof that these days a virtual presence is more important than an actual storefront!
Still, I will be so happy to begin construction on the studio in February. We are tripping over each other here trying to get everything done! We started out with a cupcake tower for Jayson and Paul's Union Ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral, which was lovely. They transformed the room with hundreds of floating lanterns and gorgeous flowers that they flew in from Hawaii (where they now reside. Yes, I'm jealous!)
Take a look at some other projects we have been working on (all of which we finished this weekend):
Ever heard of "Skelanimals?" We hadn't either, until we made this cake for a 13 year old's special birthday. They are kind of like "The Littlest Petshop" meets Goth. Their motto is: "Dead Animals Need Love Too." Each animal has it's skeleton showing and a little red heart showing it is loved. They are strangely cute, in a dark sort of way. Lindsay really sculpted her heart out on these little beauties! And Mo took the purple sculpted cake stump by storm!
Aren't they so cute and creepy?
Below are some "in process" pictures of a sculpted Po cake, from Kung Fu Panda:
Below are some "in process" pictures of a sculpted Po cake, from Kung Fu Panda:
Voila, PO!
Contrary to popular opinion, sculpted cakes do not need to be covered in fondant if you don't like it. While we do make our own fondant at Zillycakes, and it actually tastes like food, which is a good thing, still some people opt away from it. Here Po is made with good old-fashioned "kid" buttercream (mostly powdered sugar and butter), with gumpaste elements for the ears, eyes, nose, lips, and tongue. Fun!
Then there were a few special orders from California and Pennsylvania for parties here in Buffalo, one for a woman who loves animal print and another for a guy whose nickname is "spider":
Finally, we've been working on a top secret project...shhhh, don't tell a soul! Last week we finished a full scale mock-up of Biff Henderson for the Late Show with David Letterman! For those of you who don't know Biff, he is the stage manager who has been with Dave for as long as anyone. They have a fun segment where people come on the show and create Biff out of interesting materials such as cheese, post-its, bubble gum, ketchup, etc. Late last November they asked me to submit a "real time" video of me creating Biff out of cupcakes. Since nobody was going to eat those 1500 cupcakes, my staff cast them out of plaster for me, so now we have 1500 props for our windows once we open! The final image turned out amazing, but I can't show you yet. I'll be sending out the video at the end of this week to the Late Show, and with any luck they'll book me for a firm date. Then you can see Biff in cupcakes! In the meantime, here is the audition video and the show segments of the bubblegum artist for you to enjoy, plus another segment from an etch-a-sketch artist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy57Nx7PfFE Ben Harben's partipation for Letterman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9jBiNZd6Og Biff done with an etch-a-sketch
Hopefully someday soon you'll get to see some of my videos posted to YouTube as well! Check back next month and you might be able to see my 5600 cupcake installation of Obama and Lincoln in time-lapse photography! Now that would get some hits!
Pipe on!
Zilly
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Time Line
Two weeks ago I got the mother-of-all complements: A freshman in college at DePauw University in Indiana had to do a project on an artist for her Arts & Ethics class. This included working in the style of the artist and also creating a Power Point presentation to share the artist's work with the class. She chose me! I was very flattered, and I practically fell over myself trying to help her out. She asked me to describe my career as an artist, which is a more complicated task than you might expect. I came up with a timeline, and I think it's amusing enough to share on my blog. Here 'tis:
Zilly Rosen’s Timeline of Artistic-Endeavors-and-Seemingly-Unrelated-Experiences-That–Have-All-Come-Together-in-the-End (or at least by 2008):
Birth: I was born on October 10, 1967 in Evanston, Illinois as Elizabeth Ann Frazier.
1 year old: My parents nick-named me Whizbang and simultaneously fed me lots of sugar, establishing my sweet tooth before I even had teeth. My mom says I have and have always had two speeds: fast and off.
2 years old: My mom quickly figured out that she could keep me quiet if she gave me paint and paper. She liked dressing me in an artist beret and smock!
3 years old: My parents took me to many art shows, live performances of dance and music, and always encouraged me to be creative. They encouraged my self-driven projects at home, and they always supplied me with new materials. This continued throughout my entire life, to this day.
5 years old: In Brownies, I made my caterpillar from egg cartons upside down, so that mine would be different. The troop leader knew she had an artist on her hands.
8 years old: I wanted an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas, and I didn’t get it. This was a very formative experience (see me at 15 years old)
11 years old: I asked for a subscription to Architectural Digest for Christmas. This time I got what I asked for. I also got nick-named “Zilly” by one of my new friends in 6th grade. The name stuck.
12 years old: I got a spot in the “Gifted in Art” after school program at my middle school, and I spent every afternoon after school making stuff for three years, and continued that practice into high school. There isn’t a single art medium that doesn’t interest me.
15 years old: I got a job as “cookie girl” at Ganache Bakery in Evanston, IL. Finally my grudge about not getting an easy bake oven was put to rest. I worked at Ganache for 8 Christmases in a row.
16 years old: I got a job teaching “arts and crafts” at a local summer camp. I continued to teach art at different summer camps for the next 16 years.
17 years old: I received the Conway Scholarship to study art at Washington University in St. Louis. I went in as a metalsmithing major and I came out 5 years later as a printmaking major. (I took 1 semester off to work at Ganache Bakery full-time).
22 years old: I got a job developing the curriculum and teaching the art program for 7th and 8th grade art at Whitfield School in St. Louis. I worked there for 3 years.
25 years old: I took two years off and moved back to Chicago to live with my parents. During that time, I traveled to Alaska by myself, worked as a studio assistant for a potter, worked at Ganache Bakery again, worked as a barista at a coffee shop, and took a 2 month workshop in handpainted quilts at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. I also payed rent on an art studio that I never made anything in; I was too busy doing all of the above.
27 years old: I moved back to St. Louis to be a live in nanny for my friends who had their first baby. I also became a triathelete and opened another studio that I didn’t make anything in, though I organized successful sales of other artist’s work.
28 years old: I applied to Washington University for a Masters of Art in Teaching in Art Education K-12. I got in with a full scholarship, but deferred for a year to take a teaching job and make some money.
29 years old: I started dating Lee Rosen, the man who I would eventually marry. I took a trip to Guatemala with my sister and got shot through the throat by bandits. I spent the next two years speaking in a whisper and having 6 surgeries on my larynx that attempted to restore my voice.
30 years old: I started working on my MAT in Art Education, part time, as I recovered from surgeries. I also took a job at my second gourmet bakery, Truffes in St. Louis. The art community in St. Louis threw me a benefit art sale and party that raised $20,000 for my surgeries!
31 years old: I did my student teaching at an Elementary School. I still had no voice, but the kids didn’t really seem to care. It was just extremely tiring.
32 years old: I got offered a job teaching art at a private Catholic girl’s high school, Villa Duchesne. They hired me to teach design, fine crafts, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics. They didn’t care that I didn’t have a voice, and that I hadn’t quite finished my MAT. I was just a couple of papers away, so I took incompletes and took the job at Villa. I never did finish those papers!
33 years old: I got married, and change my name from Elizabeth Ann Frazier to Zilly Frazier Rosen. I also recovered some voice, so that I no longer spoke in a whisper.
34 years old: I had my first child, Eliza Mae Rosen, and dropped from full-time teaching to part-time teaching.
35 years old: My husband took a job in Buffalo, New York, and I had to quit my job and move my family away from St. Louis where I had lived for 18 years. We moved into the house where MTV filmed “Sorority Life.”
36 years old: I was a stay-at-home mom for the first time, and I stayed at home for four years. During that time I became active at the Unitarian Universalist church. Every summer for five years and counting I have written a sermon and lead a worship service during the summers when the minister is on vacation.
37 years old: I had my second child, William Myers Rosen. He weighed over 10 pounds, and broke my rib 3 days before I went into labor. I did not have a c-section, much to the amazement of just about everybody.
38 years old: I was a stay-at-home mom for my fourth and final year.
39 years old: I took a part-time job at my third gourmet bakery, Dolci in Buffalo, NY. I started working on cookies and tarts, but they eventually gave me a shot at doing the cakes. I took a few Wilton workshops at Michael’s and then started doing weddings immediately.
40 years old: I took over wedding cakes at Dolci and tripled their business in one year. I decided to start my own design business and cake school using Dolci as my bakers. I launched my website http://www.zillycakes.com/ in February, 2008, and I incorporated as Zillycakes LLC on May 22, 2008.
41 years old: Before my storefront was even open, I did a 1200+ cupcake installation of Barack Obama on Election Day. It got national attention on TV and in newspapers, and I now find myself in the incredible position of being in negotiations with the Smithsonian Institute and The Late Show with David Letterman for two separate cupcake portrait installations in 2009! My next project will be a 5,600 cupcake installation at the Smithsonian Institute on February 14, 2009 for President’s Day weekend. It’s a dual portrait of Obama and Lincoln. I still have to do a video audition for Letterman, which I will submit at the beginning of the year. I won’t have a date for that installation until after I submit my video!
Zilly Rosen’s Timeline of Artistic-Endeavors-and-Seemingly-Unrelated-Experiences-That–Have-All-Come-Together-in-the-End (or at least by 2008):
Birth: I was born on October 10, 1967 in Evanston, Illinois as Elizabeth Ann Frazier.
1 year old: My parents nick-named me Whizbang and simultaneously fed me lots of sugar, establishing my sweet tooth before I even had teeth. My mom says I have and have always had two speeds: fast and off.
2 years old: My mom quickly figured out that she could keep me quiet if she gave me paint and paper. She liked dressing me in an artist beret and smock!
3 years old: My parents took me to many art shows, live performances of dance and music, and always encouraged me to be creative. They encouraged my self-driven projects at home, and they always supplied me with new materials. This continued throughout my entire life, to this day.
5 years old: In Brownies, I made my caterpillar from egg cartons upside down, so that mine would be different. The troop leader knew she had an artist on her hands.
8 years old: I wanted an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas, and I didn’t get it. This was a very formative experience (see me at 15 years old)
11 years old: I asked for a subscription to Architectural Digest for Christmas. This time I got what I asked for. I also got nick-named “Zilly” by one of my new friends in 6th grade. The name stuck.
12 years old: I got a spot in the “Gifted in Art” after school program at my middle school, and I spent every afternoon after school making stuff for three years, and continued that practice into high school. There isn’t a single art medium that doesn’t interest me.
15 years old: I got a job as “cookie girl” at Ganache Bakery in Evanston, IL. Finally my grudge about not getting an easy bake oven was put to rest. I worked at Ganache for 8 Christmases in a row.
16 years old: I got a job teaching “arts and crafts” at a local summer camp. I continued to teach art at different summer camps for the next 16 years.
17 years old: I received the Conway Scholarship to study art at Washington University in St. Louis. I went in as a metalsmithing major and I came out 5 years later as a printmaking major. (I took 1 semester off to work at Ganache Bakery full-time).
22 years old: I got a job developing the curriculum and teaching the art program for 7th and 8th grade art at Whitfield School in St. Louis. I worked there for 3 years.
25 years old: I took two years off and moved back to Chicago to live with my parents. During that time, I traveled to Alaska by myself, worked as a studio assistant for a potter, worked at Ganache Bakery again, worked as a barista at a coffee shop, and took a 2 month workshop in handpainted quilts at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. I also payed rent on an art studio that I never made anything in; I was too busy doing all of the above.
27 years old: I moved back to St. Louis to be a live in nanny for my friends who had their first baby. I also became a triathelete and opened another studio that I didn’t make anything in, though I organized successful sales of other artist’s work.
28 years old: I applied to Washington University for a Masters of Art in Teaching in Art Education K-12. I got in with a full scholarship, but deferred for a year to take a teaching job and make some money.
29 years old: I started dating Lee Rosen, the man who I would eventually marry. I took a trip to Guatemala with my sister and got shot through the throat by bandits. I spent the next two years speaking in a whisper and having 6 surgeries on my larynx that attempted to restore my voice.
30 years old: I started working on my MAT in Art Education, part time, as I recovered from surgeries. I also took a job at my second gourmet bakery, Truffes in St. Louis. The art community in St. Louis threw me a benefit art sale and party that raised $20,000 for my surgeries!
31 years old: I did my student teaching at an Elementary School. I still had no voice, but the kids didn’t really seem to care. It was just extremely tiring.
32 years old: I got offered a job teaching art at a private Catholic girl’s high school, Villa Duchesne. They hired me to teach design, fine crafts, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics. They didn’t care that I didn’t have a voice, and that I hadn’t quite finished my MAT. I was just a couple of papers away, so I took incompletes and took the job at Villa. I never did finish those papers!
33 years old: I got married, and change my name from Elizabeth Ann Frazier to Zilly Frazier Rosen. I also recovered some voice, so that I no longer spoke in a whisper.
34 years old: I had my first child, Eliza Mae Rosen, and dropped from full-time teaching to part-time teaching.
35 years old: My husband took a job in Buffalo, New York, and I had to quit my job and move my family away from St. Louis where I had lived for 18 years. We moved into the house where MTV filmed “Sorority Life.”
36 years old: I was a stay-at-home mom for the first time, and I stayed at home for four years. During that time I became active at the Unitarian Universalist church. Every summer for five years and counting I have written a sermon and lead a worship service during the summers when the minister is on vacation.
37 years old: I had my second child, William Myers Rosen. He weighed over 10 pounds, and broke my rib 3 days before I went into labor. I did not have a c-section, much to the amazement of just about everybody.
38 years old: I was a stay-at-home mom for my fourth and final year.
39 years old: I took a part-time job at my third gourmet bakery, Dolci in Buffalo, NY. I started working on cookies and tarts, but they eventually gave me a shot at doing the cakes. I took a few Wilton workshops at Michael’s and then started doing weddings immediately.
40 years old: I took over wedding cakes at Dolci and tripled their business in one year. I decided to start my own design business and cake school using Dolci as my bakers. I launched my website http://www.zillycakes.com/ in February, 2008, and I incorporated as Zillycakes LLC on May 22, 2008.
41 years old: Before my storefront was even open, I did a 1200+ cupcake installation of Barack Obama on Election Day. It got national attention on TV and in newspapers, and I now find myself in the incredible position of being in negotiations with the Smithsonian Institute and The Late Show with David Letterman for two separate cupcake portrait installations in 2009! My next project will be a 5,600 cupcake installation at the Smithsonian Institute on February 14, 2009 for President’s Day weekend. It’s a dual portrait of Obama and Lincoln. I still have to do a video audition for Letterman, which I will submit at the beginning of the year. I won’t have a date for that installation until after I submit my video!
Sunday, November 23, 2008
The Smithsonian!
It's hard to believe, but there is a good chance my art will be in a major American museum. For less than 24 hours, but still it will be there, nonetheless! It's an ironic story. Years ago I might have loved to be in a museum, but I could never settle on a medium. I could never get a body of work done in a studio, because I crave interaction. My creative spirit seems to need the energy of others to awaken it, and the times when I tried to be a solitary studio artist never amounted to much. I was more successful as an art teacher, though I had to live vicariously through my students and their creations. I created the environment and the lessons for them, but I was left out of the art-making, for the most part.
Now my baking, that is another story. Perhaps because it is divorced from the traditional "art materials," creating my cookies (and now my cakes) never felt connected to that other story. I enjoyed it as a craft, I enjoyed the work environment of a bakery, and I enjoyed the enjoyment my baked products gave others! I found satisfaction in it partly as a meditation and partly as a design problem. I'm not self-taught, but I'm not formally taught by a culinary institute, either. My experience has come on the job over a span of 25 years: it began with Ganache in Evanston, IL owned by Jane Davis; followed by Truffes in St. Louis, MO owned by Helen Fletcher; and finally concluding with Dolci in Buffalo, NY partially owned and fully operated (at the time) by Kevin and Melissa Gardner.
I started at Ganache as a "cookie girl" when I was 15 years old, and I continued to work there seasonally for over 8 years. At Truffes, in the months before graduate school, I also made cookies, though I yearned to have a shot as the "cake lady" someday. My chance finally came at Dolci, where I took a job as soon as my youngest child was 18 months old and eligible for daycare at the JCC. After a few months there making cookies, I was given the opportunity to decorate cakes and then to take over the wedding cake "department." The wedding business tripled in my first year, and I began to have the feeling that I was quickly discovering what I wanted to be when I grew up.
After my first year of weddings, I began to make plans to brand my own name and open my own cake design studio. I'm currently about 3 to 4 months away from my grand opening, if all goes as planned. In deciding to be a cake designer and a business owner, I felt I was putting to rest any old desire to be a "gallery artist." Everything I needed personally and artistically was present in the cake business: the interaction, the creative planning, the craftsmanship of a finished product, the collaboration with the bakers and the brides. It used my entire skill set, and I felt for the first time in a long time like my creative juices were really flowing. I was building a portfolio.
The fact that my crazy Obama cupcake project garnered national attention was wonderful! It felt like a lark, a delight, a crazy woman's epic love poem in food to someone who moves her and inspires her. Through the interest in the project that followed, I began to be more aware of the way the medium itself spoke as much as the image. Cupcakes. In the hierarchy of art materials, where fiber is low and metal and glass are high, where oil is better than acrylic, and where representational work battles it out with conceptual work, where do cupcakes fall? A medium that can be bought at any grocery store and mastered by anyone with an oven and a wooden spoon. A medium that is intrinsically American, and chock-full of emotional connotations. A medium that requires audience participation, that pulls you in and then leaves the gallery as a part of you. A medium that is ephemeral in nature, existing briefly as an installation, but enduring in the memory of those who partook of it.
Is it an image? An installation? A performance? To me, it's a process, and the conception of it came about as much from my love of domestic arts and decorative arts as it did from studying gallery artists. I have always been moved by the beautiful work women have done and still do to make their chores joyful and their daily grind more beautiful. Stitching and baking and making objects for use are acts I hold in high esteem. So this new art of mine comes as much from that reverence as from seeds planted by artists who inspired my in art school. The grid on which I base my installations belongs to the weaver and the beader and the needlepointer as much as to Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett , and Sol Lewitt (all of whom have been influential in my work, too).
So, on the eve of the opening of my cake design studio "Zillycakes," I find myself in the crazy position of having been asked by the Smithsonian for a formal proposal regarding the piece I briefly proposed to them in an email, while still in my post-election euphoria. It will be a diptych of Obama and Lincoln, in honor of the theme of the Inauguration, "A New Birth of Freedom," which is a line taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. They have asked to have the piece installed on President's Day weekend, when they stage one of their biggest community outreach programs. "It will get better attendance and better press that weekend," they explained. All I could think was how much easier and cheaper it would be to get a hotel room! If the proposal is accepted, I'll install it on Friday, Feb. 13 ( with a black cat and a salt shaker present), and then it will be on display on Saturday Feb. 14. A very sweet valentine's day for me, indeed.
In one week the proposal is due. I expect to have a response from them quickly, as they seem quite excited by this collaboration. And me? Excited? Over the moon. And just a little, teeny bit vindicated...thinking about all those folks in art school who gave me a hard time over making "feel good" art so many years ago...what would they say about this? I can only imagine!
Now my baking, that is another story. Perhaps because it is divorced from the traditional "art materials," creating my cookies (and now my cakes) never felt connected to that other story. I enjoyed it as a craft, I enjoyed the work environment of a bakery, and I enjoyed the enjoyment my baked products gave others! I found satisfaction in it partly as a meditation and partly as a design problem. I'm not self-taught, but I'm not formally taught by a culinary institute, either. My experience has come on the job over a span of 25 years: it began with Ganache in Evanston, IL owned by Jane Davis; followed by Truffes in St. Louis, MO owned by Helen Fletcher; and finally concluding with Dolci in Buffalo, NY partially owned and fully operated (at the time) by Kevin and Melissa Gardner.
I started at Ganache as a "cookie girl" when I was 15 years old, and I continued to work there seasonally for over 8 years. At Truffes, in the months before graduate school, I also made cookies, though I yearned to have a shot as the "cake lady" someday. My chance finally came at Dolci, where I took a job as soon as my youngest child was 18 months old and eligible for daycare at the JCC. After a few months there making cookies, I was given the opportunity to decorate cakes and then to take over the wedding cake "department." The wedding business tripled in my first year, and I began to have the feeling that I was quickly discovering what I wanted to be when I grew up.
After my first year of weddings, I began to make plans to brand my own name and open my own cake design studio. I'm currently about 3 to 4 months away from my grand opening, if all goes as planned. In deciding to be a cake designer and a business owner, I felt I was putting to rest any old desire to be a "gallery artist." Everything I needed personally and artistically was present in the cake business: the interaction, the creative planning, the craftsmanship of a finished product, the collaboration with the bakers and the brides. It used my entire skill set, and I felt for the first time in a long time like my creative juices were really flowing. I was building a portfolio.
The fact that my crazy Obama cupcake project garnered national attention was wonderful! It felt like a lark, a delight, a crazy woman's epic love poem in food to someone who moves her and inspires her. Through the interest in the project that followed, I began to be more aware of the way the medium itself spoke as much as the image. Cupcakes. In the hierarchy of art materials, where fiber is low and metal and glass are high, where oil is better than acrylic, and where representational work battles it out with conceptual work, where do cupcakes fall? A medium that can be bought at any grocery store and mastered by anyone with an oven and a wooden spoon. A medium that is intrinsically American, and chock-full of emotional connotations. A medium that requires audience participation, that pulls you in and then leaves the gallery as a part of you. A medium that is ephemeral in nature, existing briefly as an installation, but enduring in the memory of those who partook of it.
Is it an image? An installation? A performance? To me, it's a process, and the conception of it came about as much from my love of domestic arts and decorative arts as it did from studying gallery artists. I have always been moved by the beautiful work women have done and still do to make their chores joyful and their daily grind more beautiful. Stitching and baking and making objects for use are acts I hold in high esteem. So this new art of mine comes as much from that reverence as from seeds planted by artists who inspired my in art school. The grid on which I base my installations belongs to the weaver and the beader and the needlepointer as much as to Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett , and Sol Lewitt (all of whom have been influential in my work, too).
So, on the eve of the opening of my cake design studio "Zillycakes," I find myself in the crazy position of having been asked by the Smithsonian for a formal proposal regarding the piece I briefly proposed to them in an email, while still in my post-election euphoria. It will be a diptych of Obama and Lincoln, in honor of the theme of the Inauguration, "A New Birth of Freedom," which is a line taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. They have asked to have the piece installed on President's Day weekend, when they stage one of their biggest community outreach programs. "It will get better attendance and better press that weekend," they explained. All I could think was how much easier and cheaper it would be to get a hotel room! If the proposal is accepted, I'll install it on Friday, Feb. 13 ( with a black cat and a salt shaker present), and then it will be on display on Saturday Feb. 14. A very sweet valentine's day for me, indeed.
In one week the proposal is due. I expect to have a response from them quickly, as they seem quite excited by this collaboration. And me? Excited? Over the moon. And just a little, teeny bit vindicated...thinking about all those folks in art school who gave me a hard time over making "feel good" art so many years ago...what would they say about this? I can only imagine!
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The Facebook Vortex...
Good God! I'm really on a roll, here. I started this blog, then opened a Facebook account. Somehow 10 hours just passed without my even realizing it. The kids are faint from hunger, the dog needs to be let out...wait, I don't have a dog.
I already found some favorite students from Villa in St. Louis and some old friend from Junior High and High School in Evanston. Disclaimer: I am still a really shitty long-distance friend, no matter how many internet links I have! I'm thinking of sending a message to all my old St. Louis friends asking for Amnesty...do you think they would grant it to me?
So, if you find this, and you are on Facebook, link me in (Zilly Frazier Rosen) and we'll stay in virtual touch. Tomorrow it's back to the real world...I've got a business plan to finish and a loan to secure!
I already found some favorite students from Villa in St. Louis and some old friend from Junior High and High School in Evanston. Disclaimer: I am still a really shitty long-distance friend, no matter how many internet links I have! I'm thinking of sending a message to all my old St. Louis friends asking for Amnesty...do you think they would grant it to me?
So, if you find this, and you are on Facebook, link me in (Zilly Frazier Rosen) and we'll stay in virtual touch. Tomorrow it's back to the real world...I've got a business plan to finish and a loan to secure!
Monday, November 10, 2008
Hello from Zilly
Well, I've done it, I've decided to blog. It took seeing a photo of my work go international, mostly due to bloggers, to convince me it was time.
I've named my blog Zillycake's Meditations, because most of the creative work I do is a meditation of sorts for me. That is why I always feel calmer and more at peace when I'm working on a cake or cookie project.
So, stay tuned for lots of pictures, stories, and musings about starting a new small business and trying to be creative and organized at the same time!
Constructive and/or positive comments are welcome but if you are cynical or sarcastic by nature find someone else's rainbow to piss on. Thanks.
I've named my blog Zillycake's Meditations, because most of the creative work I do is a meditation of sorts for me. That is why I always feel calmer and more at peace when I'm working on a cake or cookie project.
So, stay tuned for lots of pictures, stories, and musings about starting a new small business and trying to be creative and organized at the same time!
Constructive and/or positive comments are welcome but if you are cynical or sarcastic by nature find someone else's rainbow to piss on. Thanks.
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