Instagram might have made it famous, but the fine art of crafting a delicious pie so intricate you’re almost loathe to cut into its crust is much older than the modern ‘food art’ trend. Centuries ago, the richest and most flamboyant members of high society sought out talented head cooks who could present a sufficiently impressive dining experience filled not just with the finest ingredients, but also edible sculptural wonders.

Conrad Hagger, who worked for the Archbishop of Vienna in the 18th century, wrote a book called ’Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch 1719’(The Salzburg Cookbook) that included drawings of pies with elaborate shapes like towering reindeer, sea monsters and swans. And if you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you may recall the infamous Pigeon Pie at the fateful Purple Wedding – the monstrous one Joffrey cut into with a sword, releasing live pigeons into the air (psst… here’s a recipe for a replica, minus the live birds.)

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A post shared by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (@thepieous)

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A post shared by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (@thepieous)

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A post shared by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (@thepieous)

It may be rare to see creations of quite that intricacy on the average dinner table today, but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the art altogether. Pie making has always been among the quiet domestic arts practiced primarily by women, with decorative touches ranging from simple flowers to crusts woven like tapestries. Modern bakers are keeping the tradition alive with more contemporary designs, like those found on the blog and Instagram account Pies are Awesome, who’ve created pies inspired by pop culture phenomena like Stranger Things and Star Wars.

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A post shared by Lauren Ko (@lokokitchen)

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Some of the coolest modern pies come from bakers Lauren Ko and Karen Pfeiff Boschek, whose work is almost mathematical in its precision. While some of the designs fare better than others post-baking (in one of her Instagram posts, Ko admits that Boschek is better practiced at this, calling her a “butter sorceress”), all of the designs are sure to drop jaws at the table.

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics rarely get more delicious than this, illustrated and replicated in the form of solid chocolate, sugar crystals, fondant icing, pancakes and even bagels. Wouldn’t you want to take a bite out of an anatomically correct life-sized human skull, a 3D representation of kinetic movement, a Rubik’s cube, a Hubble Telescope photo or gory veterinary surgery in cake form?

Kinetic Tarts & Geometric Cakes

3D-printed molds allow pastry chef Dinara Kasko to make pies, tarts, cakes and other treats with shapes unlike anything you’ve ever seen in a dessert case before. Her latest is a collaboration with artist Jose Margulis, a series of delicious-looking cakes inspired by kinetic waves. They’re made of ingredients like almond sponge cake, yogurt mousse, mascarpone and streusel. Older works include ‘Triangulation,’ a lime-basil cake for SoGood magazine, and ‘The Bubbles,’ which take their inspiration from cells. For the latter, she explains, “I used such geometric constructing principles as triangulation, the Voronoi diagram and biomimicry.” Intrigued? You can buy silicone cake molds from her website and try to recreate these desserts at home.

Geometric Patterns Inside a Cylinder of Chocolate

Geometric patterns hidden within a solid cylinder of chocolate are slowly revealed by a blade on a mill. Studio Wieki Somers teamed up with chocolatier Rafael Mutter to create this installation for Vitra Design Museum, displayed at Art Basel in 2012 for a retrospective of dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld. The patterns continuously change the deeper into the cylinder you go, more complex at times and simpler at others, but always mathematical in nature.

Gory Veterinary Anatomy Cakes

This one’s for the veterinarians out there. One student at the Nottingham Veterinary School created this semi-realistic model of a canine’s superficial head muscles in cake form as part of a fundraiser; another rendered a dog testicle, while a third portrayed a leg amputation in edible form. There’s also equine surgery, and an ‘ascarid impaction colic,’ a procedure to get rid of a severe worm infestation in horses. Looks tasty, huh?

Rubik’s Cube Pastries

French pastry chef Cedric Grolet offers a unique edible spin on the Rubik’s cube in the form of 27 individual pastries. Though he’s spurned the handheld puzzle’s usual primary colors for muted pastels, the object remains recognizable in form. You can purchase one of these cakes at Le Dali, a restaurant inside the Le Meurice Hotel in Paris.

Galaxy Eclairs

Looking like something straight out of NASA’s stunning satellite imagery of space, these cosmic eclairs by Musse Confectionery in Ukraine are truly out of this world. The glaze swirls together hues of blue, purple, pink and white for results so beautiful they’d almost be hard to eat (except that they look delicious.) The chef took inspiration from Hubble Space Telescope photos, offering the eclairs in flavors like raspberry, vanilla, pistachio, salted caramel and chocolate. They’re available in the confectionery’s shop in Kiev.

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For The Love Of Stem 20 Edible Creations Inspired By Math Science

Most baristas who go the extra mile to make a cute design in the foam on top of your latte or mocha manage to illustrate a heart, a swan, a cat or maybe an owl, not an entire Vincent van Gogh painting. But there’s always an overachiever, isn’t there? South Korean barista Lee Kang-Bin shows off his illustrative prowess by reproducing masterpieces in nothing but foam and food coloring, destined to be destroyed as soon as someone gets thirsty.

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From ‘Starry Night’ and Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ to Captain Jack Sparrow and scenes from Disney movies, the artist faithfully recreates iconic imagery so impressive, it would be hard to take that first sip. Customers wait up to 15 extra minutes for one of Lee Kang-Bin’s creations, and it’s not hard to see why.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BU0-sezhOiR/?taken-by=leekangbin91&hl=en

The 26-year old owns Cafe C-THROUGH in Seoul, so there’s nobody to tell him he can’t spend his time on the clock any way he wants, and customers line up to temporarily ‘own’ one of his paintings, anyway. The self-taught artist honed his skills over ten years on the job, and calls his work ‘creamarts.’

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUJbUHwhco-/?taken-by=leekangbin91&hl=en

To see more videos of Lee Kang-Bin in action, check out his Instagram, @leekangbin91.

Who can take a hamburger, shape it into a Nike Air Max shoe? Clad the walls in waffles and paint with chocolate syrup, too? These artists can, and their edible creations are probably about to make you very hungry.

Michelangelo in Frosting and Sprinkles

One of mankind’s most revered artistic achievements, Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam,’ can be plucked right off the wall and eaten thanks to a recreation by food artist Michelle Wibowo. Half a billion cake sprinkles in 24 colors and 10,000 marshmallows went into the full-scale piece, which took 168 hours to complete for the 450th anniversary of the Italian master’s death.

Nike Air Max Hamburger

When 8 creatives were asked to interpret 8 different Nike Sportswear shoes, one in particular went in an entirely unexpected direction. Olle Hemmendorff recreated the Air Max 90 in the form of “the most powerful, most durable and most delicious material known to man: hamburger.” Who can argue with that?

Chocolate Art Supplies

Squeeze caramel, raspberry, green tea or brandy fillings out of edible chocolate bottles, or sprinkle the shavings from sharpened chocolate pencils onto your meal. Design firm Nendo created a 12-piece paint set as well as a set of edible chocolate pencils for the Seibu Department Store in Japan.

Super-Sweet Zen Rock Garden

As if the experience of consuming a box of chocolates isn’t already relaxing enough on its own, designer Tomonori Saito takes it a few steps further with an edible zen rock garden. Draw delicate lines in the sand-like sugar around black sesame and green tea rocks.

Life-Sized Gingerbread House

Somewhere at the intersection of Willy Wonka, Santa and Hans Christian Anderson lies this life-sized, almost entirely edible gingerbread house with waffles for walls, candy chandeliers, 144 pounds of chocolate ganache mortar, 660 gallons of marshmallows and 2,500 gingerbread tiles. Architecture firm Alma-nac created the ten-foot-tall house to raise funding for a hospital, and it was devoured by a thousand kids and parents in just three days.

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Art You Can Taste 23 Mouthwatering Edible Designs

Would you walk up to a gallery wall made entirely of sweet-smelling dark chocolate and lick it, Willy Wonka style? These 13 (more!) edible art creations use colorful candies, tomatoes, croissants, Kool-Aid, Jello and other food items to build everything from recreations of Mondrian paintings to massive carpets stretching across entire city blocks.

Candy Carpet in Chengdu, China

The ‘Sweet as One‘ exhibition in Chengdu, China took up nearly 14,000 square feet with a colorful expanse of candy measuring 607 feet long by 23 feet wide. 2,000 volunteers spent five days hand-pouring 13 tons of sweets into smalls quarries to create a quilt-like patterned artwork filled with flowers and panda bear faces.

Edible Chocolate LEGO Bricks

Precise molds make it possible to create and stack tiny chocolate LEGO bricks into whatever you can dream up in this fun project by illustrator and designer Akihiro Mizuuchi.

Edible Furniture by Lanzavecchia and Wai

Edible elements like hard candy, coffee, chocolate and grains create table and chair surfaces on top of metal support structures in a series of four conceptual designs by Studio Lanzavecchia + Wai. “The domestic landscape reflects our culture, our taste and our habits,” say the designers. “The objects that populate it absorb the atmosphere that pervades the space through their physicality, functionality and identity. Ostensibly living intact through good times and also adverse ones,t he domestic objects become invisible to us over time with their familiarity. How can furniture react to times of crisis? The decorative elements that were once appreciated, suddenly become superfluous and should evolve to reflect a new era of austerity; the objects become edible and offer themselves to be consumed when needed.”

Edible Versions of Art Masterpieces

The Art Fund challenged art lovers and designers to recreate famous artworks using edible materials, like a Mondrian-inspired slice of cake and a marshmallow treat version of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Autumn Rhythm (No. 30).’ Say the coordinators, “We’re hoping to inspire people, through the medium of food, to raise money for our national museums and galleries. What could be more fun than recreating your favorite work of art out of simple ingredients you have in your fridge – which you can then eat!”

Brunch-Based Cityscapes

Brunch City is a collaboration between illustrator Bea Crespo and photographer Andrea G. Portoles, using food as a medium to create architectural landscapes relating to the culture and character of particular cities. The series depicts Barcelona, Athens, Paris, Tokyo, London, Rome and more.

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Candy Carpets And Chocolate Skulls 13 Edible Designs