There’s something disconcerting about eating cake with your hands. It’s both child-like and ritualized, an act that can be a benchmark for everything from birthdays to weddings. But for food designer Miguel Olivares, eating cake with your hands is an invitation to indulge in a messy and public act of feasting.
At last night’s opening for the Neo-Domesticity Performance Art Festival at the Glasshouse Project in Brooklyn, Olivares erected his “Cake Table” as an edible installation and centerpiece for a set of opening performances.
The table is a collaboration between Olivares and food blogger Erin Clarkson of Cloudy Kitchen and is designed with a range of wet and dry ingredient fillings embedded into the cake to encourage participants to dig their way through to discover new flavors including lemon curd, strawberry jam, meringue, and crushed and salted nuts.
Olivares’ worked on the experience design and the architecture of the table itself. The “Cake Table” made its original debut in March 2017.
The food designer is a graduate of SVA’s Product of Design program where his final thesis project, In Knead, created “purpose through cooking” through a set of bread-making tools, a digital work table to perfect cooking techniques, a public experience food experience and a business concept that combined a produce market, fermentation bar and kitchen space.
