Fahrenheit 451: Book Burning

I celebrated this year's April Fool's Day in a unique manner. Rather than perform any pranks, I attended the 12th Annual Edible Books & Tea at the encouragement of my teachers. It's a book fair where the pieces shown are all edible, be it books that are made of food or meals that make reference to a piece of literature.

My project was a tribute to Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, in which books are burned on a regular basis to keep the masses in control. It consists of a series of puff pastries, sprinkled with cocoa powder and sugar and filled with vanilla pudding, mascarpone cheese, pistachios and chocolate chips. The idea behind these pastries is that they are meant to represent a pile of burnt books. The puff pastry, cut into rectangles, resemble a block of pages when baked while the cocoa powder is meant to represent the charred paper left behind by the burning.

Accompanying the pastries is a video of me set a few pastries on fire with a mini torch. This is derived from an earlier idea I had for this project, in which I would use the torch to caramelize sugar onto the pastries during the book fair. This idea had be discarded because of the Columbia College’s fire safety rules.

While the piece didn't win any of the awards that were being offered, it was still a popular work, seeing as how everyone who attended the fair ate all of my "books" in a matter of 10 minutes.