Feast For The Eyes: 3 Cookbooks Just For Looking

Toba Garrett, the wedding cake designer, is a consummate professional, and her book is for not for amateurs. But it's also full of visual pleasures for readers not ambitious enough to make a wedding cake, or in no need of one. Page after page unfolds, filled with visions of strenuous perfection: rose gardens in bloom, ribbon cascades, marzipan fruits. I have always loved peeking into the back stages of difficult professions, and the jargon of cake makers fascinates me: "The bottom tier is piped and decorated in classic Australian stringwork ... Below, near the cake board, is textured drapery work, flanked by hand-shaped rosettes and leaf relief." Well, that's just what I was going to say. For the record, I'm pretty certain it is more difficult to handcraft a hibiscus as perfect as Garrett's than it is to grow one from seed.

For every cook, there is a line in the sand one does not cross. I think I found mine when I first came face-to-face with cupcakes in the shape of terriers. Hello, Cupcake! was a New York Times bestseller in 2009, mostly because of its subversive, trompe l'oeil spirit. Here are cupcakes that look like billiard balls, cupcakes that look like corn on the cob, cupcakes that look like pandas and sharks. As in most cake decor books, taste is not the focus of Hello, Cupcake!, whose effects are created with jellybeans, Twinkies, and frosting out of a jar. I'm not sure what it says about us as a society that biting the heads off of small animals made of cake seems like good clean fun for kids' parties. But I do know that these clever illusions are enough to elicit a gasp and a chuckle every time I crack the book. And the authors' inventive use of Ziploc bags to pipe frosting is a trick every baker should know.

This book has been my favorite show-and-tell book for dinner guests since it was first published. These cakes are like the tales of Baron Munchausen — so outrageous, so fanciful, so over-the-top that there is never even the slightest sense that they are something you ought to try at home. There are cakes that resemble marble fountains, or colorful piles of satin pillows — tufted, tasseled and buttoned. There is a five-tier construction decorated to look exactly (down to the quilted stitching) like a stack of mattresses. I always feel, after browsing this book that I've been on some kind of a surreal, beautiful journey. But I'm also always rather relieved that they're only on paper, after all. Because while I can't easily imagine making such works of art, I can even less imagine eating them.