Creativity meets literary meets culinary today at the University of Hawaii’s Hamilton Library for the Hawai‘i Edible Book Contest, part of an international festival.
Cakes, giant musubi, sandwiches and sculptures made of canned food and bottled items are de rigueur for this event, now in its fourth year at UH.
It’s a contest practically tailor-made for Crystal Watanabe, a program administrator at the school’s Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences department, and she’s entered every year since the contest began in 2010.
HAWAI‘I EDIBLE BOOK CONTEST
Part of a global birthday celebration of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote the book “Physiologie du Gout,” a witty meditation on food.
>> Where: Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa
>> When: Tasting at 1 p.m. today; judging at noon
>> Fee: Canned good or cash donation to Hawaii Foodbank
>> Online info: www.diffusionadage.com
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Watanabe is naturally artistic, with a penchant for focusing her creative energy on the presentation of food. She is well known for her book "Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches" (Quirk Books, $16.95), which she co-authored with Maki Ogawa. The book offers a how-to for creating, among other cutesy dishes, adorable chickens with rice balls, corn kernels and pink kamaboko.
To channel that inventiveness into an edible book, Watanabe relies heavily on one tool: fondant, a sugar paste made into sheets.
"Once I got my hands on fondant, everything just worked itself out," she said.
That assessment seems paltry in the face of Watanabe’s 2011 cake entry, which centered on the novel "The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins.
The sheet cake was adorned with a famous image from the book of a bird and an arrow. Using fondant, Watanabe painstakingly crafted a detailed bird with individually cut feathers.
"I made the details with a fondant kit of cutters. I cut out the feathers and shaped the bird, then etched in the details with the dull side of a knife. Then I painted it with edible gold glaze," she said.
"It took something like 14 hours. I worked through the week."
Last year she submitted another "Hunger Games"-themed cake, a three-tiered creation that paid tribute to Collins’ trilogy.
Watanabe molds and shapes fondant when it’s soft, then dries it under a mosquito net so it hardens. This enables her to move her design and place it on the cake. Then she uses piping gel as glue so the fondant stays put.
Mostly, she says, her creations require "lots of thinking. I look at the book and think of things in the book to come up with ideas."
Despite her stunning designs, Watanabe is not a trained artist. "My whole family is creative, so it’s in my genes," she said.
Her son, 7, and daughter, 9, also bear the family trait.
"They always ask to participate but I don’t always let them. I’m a stickler for detail," Watanabe said with a laugh. "But I give them frosting to play with, and they do their own thing."
