Your face is no half-baked idea
Toronto’s Rebecca Levitan will turn anyone’s mug into a tasty sugar cookie
We spend so much time scrutinizing its origins and nutritional content it’s almost as if we’ve forgotten that food can be fun.
And it should be, says Torontobased artist-baker-entrepreneur Rebecca Levitan, 32.
“You should be able to play with your food.”
To Levitan, that means turning flour, sugar and butter into faces.
And not just any faces: real, honest-to-goodness look-alike faces of anyone and everyone, from the mug you see in the mirror to your neighbour down the street. But especially celebrities.
Think Beyoncé, Aziz Ansari, Frida Kahlo, Queen Elizabeth, Prince.
Since she started Eat my sweet face — her online company — a few months ago, orders have been flooding in, including from art galleries in New York and Los Angeles, where she’ll have shows later this year.
She’s been asked to make a lot of famous faces, but mainly, she says, people send in a picture to her online shop and request a cookie of their own likeness.
“It’s surreal a little bit,” she says. “It’s a special unique moment — to have an edible version of you.”
Good thing people feel that way — because that’s how her business got its start.
During 2014’s winter holiday season, Levitan, who has a master of fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, couldn’t figure out what to give two of her siblings.
The constant baker — she was the kid who would force her parents to eat her weird creations, she says — thought it would be funny if they could “dunk their own faces in milk.” So she baked up their likenesses. That’s when Levitan became addicted to making these one-of-akind pieces of edible art.
She started with the visages of friends and celebrities as a “crazy weird thing on the side with no plans for the future,” she says.
To show off her work, she’d host “eat your face Fridays” at her Toronto apartment, where friends could come and do exactly that.
Around the same time, Levitan says she began working for a local baker’s company, where she could experiment, bake and make faces, so to speak, on her days off.
People love ordering them as birthday gifts, she says.
Though the cookies ($30 per cookie) are yummy (they’re sugar cookies), many people refuse to eat them, she says, preferring to keep the edible art intact.
One customer, Levitan says, has experimented with preserving the cookie in shellac. Easy to see why. Levitan’s cookie faces are uncanny and brilliant. And in my opinion, too good to eat. Got an idea for Sourced? Email mhenry@thestar.ca