American Art Clay Company - Fake It with a Model: Artificial Cheesecakes

Fake It with a Model: Artificial Cheesecakes

With today's clay and model making technology and a little creativity, modeling has taken on a whole new twist. One technique that you may not have seen is to use clay and other modeling materials to create mock-ups of food products. Can you imagine all of the creative possibilities if you could cast copies of objects, especially food products, from a mold and then paint them and decorate them different ways? If you're thinking of making a living at this it would be especially useful for products that deteriorate or have a short shelf life. Let's take cheesecake for example.

This is a product that not only has a relatively short shelf life but has to be kept cold while on display. Given these two limitations, here's where you step in with your products because the display would have to be changed regularly if outside of the refrigeration. Just a guess, but it would seem that this may be a daily occurrence. That means that everyday, they have at least one piece of strawberry cheesecake, for example, that won't be sold since it is on display and not refrigerated. If they have a cheesecake factory type of restaurant, one where they make lots of original cheesecakes, then they would be displaying several different flavors every day that they're open. This would add up quickly to at least a cheesecake a day used for displays. This would add up to five to seven cheesecakes a week and this would add up to, well, you get the picture. It does impact their bottom line.

This is not pie in the sky type of thinking; it is used successfully all over the world for window displays. In Japan, they have done this for years and get very creative. They do it for a vast variety of products. From birthday cakes to spaghetti, they get very inventive with their models of food. In one display for an Italian restaurant, the Japanese went so far as to add a fork floating in the air that has the spaghetti starting to twist on the fork with the strand of spaghetti connected to the plate, (holding up the fake fork), with a pile of sauce covered spaghetti and meatballs below. This is very intricate and it goes to show the only limitation is your imagination.

Being a cheesecake model maker may not be your forte but it could provide a significant increase to your bottom line if you love to create your displays and you get good at this type of model making. Just think, if they're currently only displaying the cheesecakes and other mouth-watering desserts in a refrigerated case at the front of their store, you may offer the use of models and displaying their products in other places such as front windows to further entice the passing customers to a savory dessert. For instance, you can put a model of chocolate cheesecake into a window display to allure customers to come in for a sumptuous piece without having to worry about the sun melting a real cheesecake into a pile of brown ooze. Or you can just make the food for fun and forget about the profit. Either way it's a wonderful way to have fun with clay.

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