What you see here is a salad cake, as prepared by Misuki Moriyasu for the Vegiedeco Cafe in Nagoya, Japan. The “cake” part of the cake is whole vegetables blended with soybean flour, the “frosting” is tofu or cream cheese, and the filling is, well, salad.
My inclination is to say that this is horrible, and to some extent it is. We’re all conditioned to look at a cake and think that we’re about to have a whole mountain of delicious buttery sugar all up in our faces. I assume that the cognitive dissonance that salad cake would cause would be verging on, like, traumatically painful.
Source: marieclaire.co.uk
On the other hand, Vegiedeco says that they’re selling the cakes because they want to level up the experience of eating salad. They’re correct in saying that “throwing random vegetables in a bowl” is messy on the one hand and visually unappealing on the other. Just as much as we have conditioned ourselves to think that cake is necessarily sugary, we have also conditioned ourselves to believe that the vegetable-potpourri method of salad composition can be beautiful. It can’t, at least not in the classical sense.
So why not bust both of those myths and at least try a salad cake, right? If you can teach yourself to eat salad that looks like a garden barfed in a bowl, you can probably teach yourself to believe that you deserve the prettiest possible salad, too.
Original by: Rebecca Vipond Brink
