Jay DeFeo Floating Island

Donald Judd's Birthday Suit... I Mean... Celebrating Ice Cream

Jay DeFeo Floating Island

Not long ago, I mentioned baseball in a post and assured you it would be the only time you would catch me referencing sports. Since then, I have attended two Giants games at AT&T park and a few days after that listened to the Mets playing the Giants in the kitchen, while I was playing with cookie dough.

At the stadium, watching the game live, I had a bit of a hard time following the innings and strike outs, as I found myself more taken by the bountiful bouquets of cotton candy bouncing up and down the stairways across the stadium. Or the way a vendor would hand a churro to a customer as if they were passing the baton in an Olympic relay. The best , though, was the fellow, armed with a holster of whipped cream around his waist, who floated up and down our row suited with a back pack of hot chocolate.

Surely by now you are wondering where this is going or get to the part about baseball already. Perhaps by now you are imagining Modern Art Desserts taking their Pop Art Corn to the bleachers? Or the Mondrian Cake served up alongside garlic fries and beer? As these thoughts fleeted around between innings, so did the image of the late San Francisco artist, Jay DeFeo flying a Giants banner from the fire escape of her Fillmore Street apartment while “The Rose” (1958–66) is removed via forklift.

The Jay DeFeo Trust posted this gem right as the Giants sweep the World Series in 2012 and DeFeo’s masterpiece was about to go on view at SFMOMA for her revelatory retrospective. During the exhibition walk through, one SFMOMA curator noted were DeFeo, an avid Giants fan, still with us today, you can bet she would have skipped the exhibition opening for the Giants homecoming parade.

Although we have yet to make desserts (marshmallows!) based on baseball bases, we did create a dessert, our version of an Ile Flottante, based on one of DeFeo’s works that we offered while it was on view at SFMOMA.

The Illustrated History of the Universe is an oil painting featuring a deceptively simple white disc floating asymmetrically against an impasto grey ground. Its complexity lies in how the layered textures convey three-dimensionality. I love that you can see the artist’s handprint on the bottom left.

So, although I can’t give you a play-by-play of the nine innings of the Giants game I attended since my attention was drawn to other things, I can give you step-by-step instructions on how to knock this DeFeo dessert out of the park. The photos that follow were all taken by Willa Koerner - at SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

Step 1: sift the powdered sugar.

Step 2: beat powdered sugar with egg whites. // Step 3: pile the sugar + egg mixture into a piping bag- and also fold caramelized cocoa nibs into fluff before loading the mixture into the piping bag- details, details!

Step 4: Pipe the meringues (an Ateco 808 tip is what we used). // Step 5: Bake meringues at 200 degrees for 1 hour and let them cool in the oven overnight.