Courtesy of JSTK

Michelle Palm loves this one...

​With a City Pages photo shoot, an upcoming book, and a website that's been getting all kinds of acclaim, Jelly Shot Test Kitchen is having an amazing year. It's the brain child of Edina resident Michelle Palm, whose stunning gelatin cocktails and top-notch photography make it obvious why she's been getting tons of attention.

To date Palm has made over 100 different types of gorgeous alcoholic delights. To see some more of her jiggly artwork and hear how she got started, read on.


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The only thing more fun than eating food is reading about it

​ This is the time of year many of us take stock of the things in our lives and make some decisions about what should stay and what should go. What better time to slough off your old, tired magazine subscriptions and usher in some that are shiny and new? The Hot Dish got a peek at a beautiful magazine that just made its debut this month from Stampington and Company, which publishes such mags as Where Women Create and Somerset Studio. Their latest addition is called Where Women Cook, a quarterly magazine dedicated to women "who are passionate about all things food."

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The Sweet Swede, a fudge shop in Lindstrom, brought their signature dish, lingonberry fudge.

​On Sunday, the 15th annual Taste of Chocolate Dessert Competition took place in Bloomington, with more than a dozen bakers, pastry chefs, and chocolatiers vying for honors and distributing samples throngs of chocolate fans. The competition included entries from Crave at the Galleria, Obsession Chocolates, Patisserie Margo, Creative Confectionaire, and more. Proceeds benefitted the Bloomington Fine Arts Council.

Here are a few of the tasty highlights from the day.

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All photos courtesy Cakewrecks.com

​Let's face it: there's a true art to making a good cake, and not everyone who endeavors to make one is such an artist.  All sorts of things can go wrong, whether it's the result of a simple miscommunication (as in the above photo) or the shortcomings of the person baking the cake.  Fortunately, Florida native Jen Yates has made it her mission to highlight the hilarity of these everyday monstrosities with her highly-popular blog Cake Wrecks.

The website features cakes made exclusively by professional "wreckorators" and posts a handful of new examples on a daily basis.  Yates' blog - notable for the sharp, satirizing captions she gives each image and her pervading dislike for cupcake cakes - has built a devoted following and even spawned a best-selling book.

Getting into Cake Wrecks can be a shocking and addictive experience, so to help the uninitiated get started and give regular readers a chance to bask in the glories of the past twelve months, Hot Dish offers up its ten favorite wrecks from 2009.

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puroticorico/Flickr

​Tour de Farm has put together a great eight-minute video recap of the recent dinner it put on at the Walker Art Center, the second in a series of dinners by the Scott Pampuch-fueled org. The July 30 event brought together some serious culinary superpower to make a multi-course meal for over 100 guests under threatening clouds on the museum lawn.

The video's got some great shots of, among other things, the long dinner table on the museum lawn from the museum kitchen above, hands shaking across the table, and the close-up efforts and camaraderie of some of our best local chefs. It's the feelgood promotional food vid of the year.

Tour de Farm's blog also has a three-part recap -- with some kickass photos -- of the event. See what local personalities you can pick out of the crowd.

Video after the jump.

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Local photographer Chris Bohnhoff (pictured) goes deep into the personal nature of snacking in a new photo series:

Snacks are such a personal thing. They're horded in desk drawers, tucked on top of refrigerators, carried to work or school in briefcases and backpacks. And snacks can be very specific: if you're a Cheez Its person (like I am), no other cheese cracker will quite do.

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Matt Biddulph/Flickr

The offbeat and interesting San Francisco quarterly meatpaper recently debuted a photo exhibit by one of its regular photogs featuring portraits of people whose livelihoods involve meat. And I know, I know, we don't live in San Fran, but more than a few of the portraits may be viewed online, and they're def. worth a glance.

The indie mag, which has been around for two years now, and was launched by a former Salon.com designer and a public radio and print journalist, features articles on topics that range boudin to roasted cicadas to meat cocktails. It was recently described by San Francisco Magazine described as "seek[ing] to fatten your imagination with a diet of articles devoted to matters of the flesh."

My fave photo is the one of the woman in pigtails, holding an upside down ... turkey? What is that? The second photo is of the magazine's two editors.

brettneilson/Flickr

Thanks to a heads-up from a devoted Hot Dish reader, we happily bring to you the 302 "approved" submissions -- meaning there were originally actually more than 302, Jesus God -- to the Pi Press's "Peeps Diorama Contest."

Hot Dish wrote about the Washington Post's diorama contest a few weeks ago, but it looks like in sheer Peeps passion, we may done got the Post beat. Great job, peeps!

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photo by Alec Pozner/flickr

Two of the many things that I love in life are beer and words. So it was with great joy that I discovered a place where beer and the art of words live together, laugh together, and love together. That place is called Beer Haiku Daily.

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From the fertile imaginations of geeky visionaries, comes of reality of tasty treats from a galaxy far, far away. Check out these amazing creations from some of our sci-fi lovin' brethren.

dphoto by jenosale/flickr

May the frosting be with you.

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Tags:

Geek craft, Michelle Leon