Taste the Rainbow.

As a writer, I've spent a lot of time wondering about words: the sound of them, the look and feel of them, the shapes they make and the images they conjure. (Robert Pirosh captures this fascination to a tee here.) "What's the texture of 'anger'?" an old English teacher asked once. "If each season had a scent, what would it be?"  

With a six-part collection she calls COLORS, ice cream maker Jeni Britton brings a similar curiosity to the culinary world: when you see a color, she asks, what do you think you will taste? To her mind, for starters, the building blocks of velvet green are spirulina, lemongrass, and coriander. The sprightliness of yellow comes from lemons crushed whole. And the mysteries and many layers of black are laced with sea salt, licorice, and a splatter of dark chocolate. See more, here.

See also: pencils for dessert; edible forests; pickable, lickable chocolate walls.

Have a happy Thursday!

Whiskey Business.

The most beautiful whiskey cups in the world are made in Brooklyn by Shino Takeda. I bought one this winter at General Store in Venice (which might be the most beautiful shop in the world), and I keep it in my room because storing it behind cabinet doors just wouldn't be right. See more of Shino's work, here.

More items for purchase at Shino's World on Etsy, here. Happy Wednesday.

Mother's Mother.

My family is in town from LA this week, staying in an apartment ten minutes from mine. Last night, finding ourselves in the middle of a thunderstorm, we canceled our plans to find dinner in the neighborhood and my mom cooked for us instead, as if we were back in California and this was any ordinary night of the week. We ate off unfamiliar dishes in a strange kitchen, gathered around someone else's slightly-too-small table; somehow, still, it felt like home.

A day later, it seems fitting to write about Mother's Mother, a Berlin-based supper club honoring the cooking of mothers all over the world. At each dinner, a different chef celebrates a mother or grandmother of his or her choice by sharing dishes based on her family recipes with a small group of guests. The club is the brainchild of Kavita Meelu and has honored thirteen women thus far, hailing from a host of countries including Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Israel, Ghana, and Italy. (Peruse photos of the suppers, here.)

Happy news: Mother's Mother will be coming to New York City this winter. If you know of anyone who'd like to be a part of a dinner, you can let Kavita know, here. Have a wonderful Wednesday in the meantime.

Further reading: peeks into pantries; Delicatessen with love.

Lick the Walls.

It's exceedingly difficult to make anything brown look attractive in photographs - I learned this the hard way while experimenting briefly with food photography. This room, at first glance, seems to be no exception. However, does your perception change when you're told the walls are made of chocolate?

In fact, artist Anya Gallaccio had a less-than-romantic vision when creating the installation, which is titled Stroke: "The desire to interact by picking, licking or stroking the chocolate-covered walls is almost compulsive. What is beautiful…becomes putrid and decayed."

Foulness of old and over-licked chocolate aside, I have to wonder also: will there be ants? 

Read more about Stroke, here.

Edible Forests.

This week in astounding Japanese culinary creations: edible forests made using fork "trees" that stand upright when inserted into pre-cut slots on a rectangular wooden board. Jellybean leaves, branches made of fig and prosciutto - how deliciously Alice in Wonderland. 

Related: candy paint, chocolate pencils, and an edible zen garden, with sesame rocks and sugar sand (laments the very funny writer at Spoon & Tamago, "the adorable wooden rake included in the set cannot be eaten").

Via Spoon & Tamago. Made by Tetusin Design Office and local artists for the Okawa Conserve.

Everything But.

I've been a fan of artist Morgan West's work - and her excellent site, Panda Head - for about as long as I've been blogging. One of my favorite features? Her series on kitchen sinks, which allows readers a glimpse into a space many of us overlook. (And who wouldn't be interested to know what the Food52 sink looks like, or Molly Yeh's, or Emily Hilliard's?) It's intriguing, refreshing, surprisingly intimate.

See the entire series on Morgan's blog, Panda Head, here. Happy Tuesday!

Chocolate Pencils.

I'm behind on the times, obviously, because these chocolate pencils by Nendo are over five years old - but as an impassioned sugar fiend and writer (albeit one who rarely writes by hand), I just couldn't let these images fester any longer in my bookmarks folder. Choose a pencil, then "sharpen" over a glossy chocolate cake. Brilliant.

I wrote about Nendo's equally magnificent chocolate paint set last year - check it out, here.

See more at Nendo's website. Found via Arq4Design.

Rainbow Cake.

Initially, I had no plans to post about this cake, which I made two nights ago for my roommate Jamie's birthday, but it was such an improvement over last year's cake (seen here), that I ultimately decided to share. (As my friend Julie wrote in a text message yesterday, "I hope you are blogging the $#!@ out of that cake!") So here it is. Though it was time-consuming, it was actually relatively simple, and while the final result wasn't quite as perfect as creator Kaitlin Flannery's, it still may just be the best thing I've ever made.

Find the recipe by Kaitlin Flannery on Whisk Kid, here. (Also, for kicks, here's a video of Kaitlin recreating the cake with Martha Stewart in 2010.) Happy birthday, Jamie!

Mission to Marzipan.

Around this time last year, I made a decision to start over. 2013, young as it was, had been rough, and my friends and I chose a random night in February as our new New Years Eve. We crowded around a table in our favorite neighborhood bar, counted down to midnight, clinked our glasses. We made resolutions. We started again.

Molly Yeh is one of my favorite bloggers and the creator of the cake below, which she calls resolution cake.  I'm reposting it here today (with her permission) because I love it for all its chocolate-marzipan goodness, and because I think the beginning of March is as good a time as any to assess the year, revise goals, amend resolutions. Like spring cleaning for the soul.

Molly's 2014 resolutions include eating macaroni and cheese at midnight, making frequent visits to the library, and spending more time with cake (brilliant). Mine, right now, is not to fall asleep in the snow - literally, of course, and figuratively. Anais Nin, whose diaries I'm making my way through now, explains:

You live...sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterly, for instance), or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure…Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken.

As the year continues, I'd like to take care that I don't fall asleep in the snow. I'd like to continue to tend to my planet. I hope to read more. And I hope that all of this, and the rest of the year, includes many, many chocolate cakes.

Photos by Molly Yeh. Find the recipe for resolution cake, here. Thank you so much, Molly! 

The Sea, the Sky, the Dreaming Katydids.

After a dazzling spring-like weekend - during which I attempted to sunbathe in a bright corner of a coffee shop and spent an evening kicking back at a neighborhood bar with this guy (name unknown) - it's winter again, with daytime highs hovering near freezing.

To focus on the positive: beautiful things happen when the temperature drops - biologist Jeff Bowman knows. On his way back from the North Pole in 2009, he found a blooming garden in the midst of an ice-cold sea. "Frost flowers," he tells NPR's Robert Krulwich. "They were everywhere."

Read more about the science behind frost flowers at NPR, here. Photos by Matthias Wietz.

More for Monday:

-My friend Maria (creator of these beautiful prints and calendars) was interviewed on Refinery29 last week. It's worth checking out for her outfits alone, and for her sky-blue toenails.
-Adrianna's doughnut ice cream, served with doughnuts on the side - and sprinkles, of course.
-And this, by Shirley Jackson via Tin House: "…even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

Window Watchers.

It snowed all day yesterday - and there was rain and heavy wind, too - so Lily and I stayed inside and made pancakes and watched from our window. At one point in the morning, the top headline on CNN read: Seriously, just stay home. We did, and the day passed slowly: we worked, we read, we went to bed early. Not so long ago, this level of inactivity might have made me antsy; these days, though, I'm learning to embrace seasons, ones that occur internally, and the ones passing outside my living room window. Nothing happened today, I told my parents on the phone last night.

Sometimes, in winter, that's okay.

Wishing you all a very happy Valentine's Day. I'm spending mine outside the city, celebrating a friend's birthday in a very top-secret fashion (more on that later). I'll be back next week with a new POV post; in the meantime, reading material for the weekend:

-Fruit loaf and sponge cake by George Orwell.
-Italian pasta divas.
-Beautiful books with curious titles: Stories of Strange Women; Travels of a Rolled Oat; Stars, etc.
-And lastly, on heartbreak: "[Its] purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open…make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life. And you do."

See you Tuesday. Photos via my Instagram.

Sweet & Art.

Make the world's most beautiful cookies with cutters by Printmeneer of the Netherlands: Mad Hatters, golden ratios, 1990s Volvo station wagons. You can even make a chocolate bar shaped cookie, as shown here. Just what I've always wanted.

Shop these shapes and more at Printmeneer. 

Crafted Crops.

"Just think," I found myself saying to my roommate Jamie last night, "In five short months, it'll be summer, and we'll have the windows open, and it'll be so hot we won't know what to do with ourselves."

As it happens, it's six degrees right now in New York City, the streets are blanketed in snow, and our windows are glazed in a thick layer of frost. The world outside is cold and colorless - which is why this handmade paper orchard, comprised of thousands of pieces of paper produce, caught my attention.

I'm a little late to the game (the orchard was built in 2011 by Gloss Creative at Melbourne's GPO); still, this morning, I can't imagine a more welcome sight.

Visit Gloss Creative's website, here. Photos by Sam Ali and Marcel Aucar.