An Andy Warhol inspired dessert party
Baking from his outlandish 1950s cookbook
Andy Warhol’s illustrative work extends further into the culinary world beyond just inspiring the title of ‘Love is a Pink Cake’ by Claire Ptak.
He illustrated Amy Vanderbilt’s 1961 ‘Complete Cookbook’ with minimalist line drawings depicting processes like how to roll-out pie dough and make decorative lemons garnishes for fish.
Maybe even more obscure is Andy Warhol’s self-published 1959 satirical cookbook called ‘Wild Raspberries’ in collaboration with his friend Suzie Frankfurt. The savory and sweet recipes are tongue-in-cheek outlandish, making fun of fancy French-inspired cookbooks popular during that time. The creative photos and descriptions inspired me to use it as a dessert party theme. Unlike his commercial cookbook illustrations, Warhol’s cookbook illustrations are informal with loose sketchy drawings, wonky calligraphy, and bright coloring.
I picked three dessert recipes that were relatively straightforward to recreate, but there were others with more potential for mouth-dropping presentation that I wished I could make. For example, the ‘Gateau of Marzipan’ looks like a cake basket, complete with a braided gingersnap handle and filled with boules of pistachio ice cream. The ‘Baked Hawaii’ is a towering upside-down pyramid cake topped with freshly churned lemon ice cream, pea green meringue, and decorated with orchids and papaya.
The first dish I picked is like a dessert-version of an appetizer, called ‘Chocolate Balls a la Chambord.’ It is a very-random platter of chocolate balls with almonds, maraschino cherries, and mint. The perfect symmetrical plating, with little regard for the overall combination, feels very 1950s.
The second dish was ‘Torte a la Dobosch,’ a coffee-flavored layer cake with orange glaze decorated with pineapple, oranges, and roses. The book documents the recipe for the cake, but based on the ingredients was unsurprisingly a miserable failure. It makes me wonder if it was an actual recipe, or just something made in jest, using something like angel food cake as inspiration. There is a real Dobosch Torte, but it is a totally different chocolate-caramel layer cake.
Lastly, the finale was the A&P Surprise, a boozy apricot and whipped cream layer cake. I substituted peaches and Grand Marnier for apricots and rum and left out the extra toppings. I love that “recipe” recommends buying an old unfrosted cake from the A&P, one of the largest grocery stores at the time. Even though boxed cake mix was available at the time, it hadn’t fully gained popularity. This one was sweet, but still pretty good in a retro way.
I’m sure Warhol never thought anyone would make recipes from ‘Wild Raspberries’ since the hope was for it to be a viral money-maker. My attempt at making ‘Chocolate Balls a la Chambord,’ ‘Torte a la Dobosch’, and ‘A&P Surprise’ is below. The menu and description definitely felt fancier than the actual execution, but it was fun to explore cooking through a unique lens of the past. It also made me think about how much we rely on standard recipes without much creativity and exploration to create something new.
If you’ve enjoyed these illustrations, you also might like Warhol’s illustrative series on cats…
My shopping list has tofu and potato protein, and I’ll be baking from ‘Voila Vegan’ by Amanda Bankert next week.