This Tokyo artist turns slices of toast into edible art

While the world picks up cooking as a new quarantine hobby, Tokyo-based designer and artist Manami Sasaki has taken her artistic and culinary skills to a new level, turning plain slices of toast into mini works of art.

This crispy piece of art, for example, resembles a design from the Japanese card game Hyakunin Isshu Karuta. The kimono-clad lady on the toast is Sei Shonagon, a Japanese author and poet from around 1,000 AD. For the washi paper-like base, Sasaki used sour cream and dried bonito flakes, plus squid ink for the text. The edible illustration of Sei Shonagon, on the other hand, was made from purple cabbage, salmon flakes, cheese, whitebait, shrimp and seaweed.

Sasaki even created a little Zen rock garden on a piece of toast. Sour cream was used for the intricate fork-raked sand while macadamia nuts and walnuts served as rocks. Those moss formations? They were actually matcha powder.

Sasaki’s toast series also includes more modern motifs, her take on traditional Japanese kintsugi, and even a manga comic scene. See her Instagram account for more tasty artworks.

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