10 Food Porn Geniuses

Iven Kawi’s floral cake designs will make you double take. Her sugary botanicals look so real, from pink lotus blossoms to succulent desert scenes to summer peonies. The artisan baker does not have a shop and still works from her home in a village just outside Jakarta, Indonesia. She’s become extremely popular on Instagram with her floral designs and demand for her cakes is so high she now employs a team of 14 women bakers and pastry chefs.

Hazel Zakariya’s smoothie bowl paintings were actually born out of a mistake. "I first got the inspiration while I was trying to garnish my soup with coconut cream swirls. It didn't go exactly as planned at first. But then I saw the opportunity of turning it into something else, and I turned the coconut cream swirls and pesto into a tree instead." Since then she’s developed natural pigments from vegetables and superfoods to create smoothie paint for all kinds of illustrations including nature, botanicals and popular movie characters.

Coffee lovers, this art is for you. Liv Buranday uses coffee and coffee grounds to paint animals, pop culture portraits and incredibly life-like vignettes. The coffee stain has a watercolor-like quality and the grounds give each piece texture and depth.

When Linda Miller Nicholson’s son turned five, he got picky about vegetables. Nicholson developed rainbow-colored veggie pasta to hide the vegetables and it worked. "I’ve been developing new colors ever since," Nicholson said. "I puree vegetables, herbs, and superfoods with eggs from my own chickens and ducks, before adding the puree to flour to make over 25 different colors of pasta dough. Some of the ingredients I use to make colors include turmeric, beets, spirulina, spinach, nettles, harissa, paprika, butterfly pea flowers, matcha, blueberries, acai, goji berries, and cacao." Once she mastered colors, Nicholson moved on to patterns. "I treat pasta the way a fashion designer treats textiles," she said. "I regularly approach strangers, asking to take a picture of their shirt or shoes, so that I can later turn it into a pasta pattern."