Kapiti's Edible Books

The Kapiti Book Arts Group celebrated the International Edible Book Festival with a delicious, inventive, playful and creative lunch at Teresa's place in Pekapeka. I'm sorry that I can't convey the sensory overload of so much colour, smell, taste, texure and excited bibliophiliac conversation. But you can at least scroll down and admire the photos of the books before we ate them.

Teresa Francis set the tone with her gingerbread hearts spelling out Kapiti Book Arts-delicious dunked into tea and coffee.




Fiction and Chips (A Battered Book) by Ngaere MacKinnon was not very inviting to eat, but wonderful to look at. She dipped an old Georgette Heyer novel in batter and deep fried it to a golden crisp, served wrapped in newsprint with chips. This was personal pick for 'best concept.'




Loll-eata by Carol Devlin was a lolly cake sewn onto raised cords (of licorice). Sinfully sweet and possibly the most technically adept of our edible books structures today.










Brigid Grant's Cheese Straws was a flaky pastry and cheese concoction which looked very book-like before being served up with crudites and blue cheese dip.










Prue Townsend ruefully named her work Failed Florentines but as a book structure this was a winner. Based on Clair van Viet's Narcissus hanging scroll structure variation on Aunt Sally's Lament, this edible book had serious book arts credentials which more than compensated for the florentines being not quite as chewy as Prue would have liked.






Dawn Ellen's little Prayer Book combined fruit leather and mountain bread in honor of Easter.













And me, well I did another version of the Mexican landscape book I pictured last week. It didn't look quite as good today (though it tasted just as yummy). The main difference was that in honour of Kristin, our guest from Arizona, I renamed it an Arizona landscape.