BENGALURU: Banana-cinnamon bread pudding, banana nutella cookies, banana strawberry cake... there are numerous ways to turn this humble fruit into an exquisite dessert. But how about having a dessert in the shape of a banana? Yes, you heard that right. Paying tribute to the most trending banana art by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which was duct-taped to a wall, which went on sale for $120,000 at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, city-based pastry chef Vinesh Johny created a pastry replicating the art.
One look at the pastry and it would be hard to distinguish it from the real art. While the outer crust of the pastry is make out of chocolate dough, the filling is made of a banana cake, banana compote and caramelised milk chocolate. For Johny, the fun part was making the edible duct tape. “The duct is made out of chocolate dough, which is extremely delicious, and was sprayed with silver colour to keep it almost real,” says Johny, co-founder, Lavonne Academy of Baking Science and Pastry Art and its café. It took a whole day to create the pastry but one of the important things – the mould for banana – was made by his friend Nishit Kamath, who specialises in 3D printing.
The 30-year-old pastry chef got the inspiration when the banana art started trending for its high auction price. Since the banana art pastry was not made for sale, the pastry chef also received some hilarious reactions to it on social media. One of the comments says, “OMG pls pls I want to buy this… take the millions.” But Johny has his favourite pick. “One meme left me in splits. It had three sections that show what the world sees (the actual art), what the Malayalees see (banana chips) and what I see (the pastry of the art),” he laughs.
Johny has been known for his experimentation with pastry. In 2018, he created a bucket cake, which became a rage. He still gets orders for the same. The last one was a series of ‘mood pills’– chocolate made in the shape of pills depicting various moods. “There is a Christmas edition of mood pills too, which depicts naughty and nice pills,” says Johny.