During a trip to LA this weekend, I went to the Getty Museum. Like most people who go to the Getty, I used it as an opportunity to re-think and re-invigorate the way I’d like to decorate and construct desserts.

I originally conceived of the idea with a modern art museum in mind, given the often abstract designs that desserts are presented in, but I try not to pass up chances to go to one of the most beautiful spots in LA. The white marble buildings and gardens of the Getty form a sort of campus that overlooks LA and the Pacific.

So, my problem with many desserts is unnecessary adornment that is either impractical or trite. The star tip used in piping icing epitomizes this for me. It’s the standard decoration for a cake that looks silly without being especially charming. Because so much frosting is used to create designs, it’s usually a mediocre frosting, and to make the situation worse, the increased surface area of the ridged icing means that more will be dried out. So much of this stuff is scraped aside by cake eaters.

And on the other hand, desserts presented with random splotches of color or lines also make me question their relevance to the situation at hand.

I think that dessert design should, of course, be fun (that’s what desserts are all about), but also use a bit of form and function logic. Rather than relying on worn out designs, it’s more interesting for the pasty chef to adapt the design for the individual dessert and its intended effect, like a Frank Lloyd Wright or Maury Rubin approach.

I thought about what is necessary and what is beautiful as I looked at the Getty’s collection of 1700-1800’s French and Italian paintings. Classical works, in which everything had a purpose. A portrait would have a person in an appropriate space with relevant personal objects. A scene from a story would have the characters and details of the action. Great. That makes sense. No anachronistic splotches of color or squiggly lines….

until I noticed something as my eyes drifted from one painting to another….

Oh my god.

So… It turns out that even paintings have their form of star tip absurdity. I guess humans like to frame artistic creations with bold lines. Like a frame is needed to hold a painting, an icing border is used to cover the corners and layers of a cake. Fair enough. But why not explore a larger variety of designs? That’s all I’m asking.

In other news, I liked applying the ideas of using color on the entire canvas and creating perspective on flat surfaces. That can be worked into desserts. The decorative arts wing also offered new ideas on the depths and colors and designs that make up a whole three dimensional piece of art.

Anyway, it was a fun new way to go through a museum, and I think I will also try a modern art museum…. There are, after all, way fewer frames there.

The closest airport to Napa is Oakland, and under ideal conditions, it takes an hour to drive those 50 miles. I learned that if you go during rush hour (Friday at 3:30, apparently), it takes one hour and forty-five minutes.

Sacramento is about 10 miles more, but I think it should be less congested. I may try that out.

Many people think of desserts as colorful and delicious artistic creations, but for the first three weeks of my program, I have two classes: Culinary Math and Culinary Science & Technology. We have 6 hrs of class that starts at 7am and ends at 1:30pm, which will be the same time frame we’ll use when we get into the kitchen in our toques and chef’s uniforms (right now, we’re business casual). We are also have a rather gourmet lunch (after two weeks, they haven’t even served the same protein twice) with desserts made by a class that started 6 months ago.

I often like to think of baking and cooking as science experiments, so I’m eager to build on what I’ve learned from Alton Brown. It is hard to sit in class for such a long time, but when I think about the Chef Instructor who teaches for 6 hours (standing the whole time), I try to sit up a little straighter and stop a yawn before it starts.

We also do experiments that would be appreciated by home bakers if they had the time, materials, equipment, and employed a full time dishwasher. For instance, as part of our lesson on starches, we made a slurry out each of six starches: cornstarch, potato starch, arrowroot, clear gel (a derivative of cornstarch), tapioca flour, and flour. A slurry means that you whisk the starch in a small amount liquid (in this case, water) to dissolve it before adding it to the larger amount of liquid so that it doesn’t clump up. We then combined each with hot water and whisked –some for a few seconds off heat, some for a few minutes boiling on heat — until they turned clear and gelatinous. After they cooled, we took tasting spoons and sampled each starchy result. They looked like pie fillings without any flavorings, and tasted as good or worse than you can imagine that tastes….. but it was a good lesson to see what these materials do before we play around with them in recipes. That way, we can anticipate how a recipe can and should turn out, and we can decide whether we want to use the suggested starch for a certain application or not, depending on our preference for taste, texture, and how we want it to react with other ingredients. Flour also contains starch, so it explains the gloss that it often takes on when heated.

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Yes, there are palm trees in wine country.

The microwave’s waves penetrate through food. The oven’s heat warms only the surface of food, so the heat has to conduct through the inside molecule by molecule.