Book Food: Night and To Kill a Mockingbird

       I already shared the poke cake and black tea cupcakes to represent books for my English project.  Finally, here are the other two foods I baked.

        Night by Elie Wiesel was about the Holocaust, so of course it was sad.  A key theme reflected on the struggle between survival and humaneness.  Also, bread played a significant role in the book since it was the prisoners' key to survival.  Thus, I made bread with a heart baked inside of it.  The hard crust represents hardship and the soft heart inside shows that even in difficult situations, humanity prevails.  Quite profound.

         To make the bread, first make some pink bread dough (tinted with either food coloring or beet powder).  Roll it into a cylinder, wrap it in foil, let it rise, and bake it.  Then cut a notch out to make it look like a heart with a lot of depth.  Freeze the heart until solid.  Next, make some regular bread dough.  Roll it into a rectangle, brush it with egg whites, and wrap the frozen heart inside.  Be sure to press a strip of plain bread dough into the notch in the heart. Place the dough in a pan, let it rise, brush with egg wash, and bake. Do all this and you have heart bread.

           To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a sweet book taking place in Alabama, and in the early 1900s I think.  Racism and segregation play a large role in the maturation of its speaker, Scout.  Tradition is valued by the citizens in the book and largely controls their actions.  To symbolize tradition, I baked a lane cake, famous in Alabama.  However, Scout and other characters break tradition by supporting African Americans.  To show this, I frosted the cake with chocolate frosting instead of the normal seven-minute-style  frosting.  Also, to represent segregation, I cut the lane cake and chocolate cake into concentric rings and mix-matched them to make a checkerboard cake. 

       So now you know foo can symbolize a lot.  Not only can it reflect your lifestyle or personality, but it is also a great medium for representing book themes.  Enjoy! And forgive me for bringing back memories of English class after school is out for summer.