#39 in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the alphabet.
A little something to satisfy your sweet tooth: edible letters made from sugar and gelatin created by Spanish graphic and industrial designers Aranxa Esteve and Lucia Rallo.
For the last four years, the pasta of choice here at Alphabet Soup has been your Sesame Street Organic Alphabet Pasta. These friendly letters have been used exclusively for the many bowls of pub day celebration soups featured in my ongoing Soup of the Day series.
Recently I discovered you’ve discontinued this product!
*weeps*
I had been faithful to your alphabets for good reason. Not all alphabet pastas are created equal, and Earth’s Best really was THE BEST!
AS Kitchen Helpers give Earth’s Best six paws up!
It had nothing to do with being organic, or that cute picture of Grover on the box (he still does a happy dance whenever Carrie Jones’s name is mentioned). No, it has to do with strength.
While not the biggest letters once they’re cooked up, these guys stood up to being boiled, drained, sorted, then carefully lowered with toothpicks into soup without breaking.
If you accidentally dropped them, they’d giggle and happily bounce off the floor, all the while remaining intact. If you placed them a little too much to the left or right, they didn’t mind being pushed over a smidge or two. Once refrigerated, they retained their fresh appearance for two weeks, anxious to star in future soups.
But now, they’re gone. *bites knuckles*
Apparently you discontinued them sometime last Fall (?), but I only found out recently when I got down to my last half a box.
Oh sure, there’s some kind of replacement available with the same distributor listed. It goes by the brand DeBoles, Kids Only! Yeah, a red box, also organic, with slightly larger letters than before.
Imposter!
I don’t mind the larger size, but these letters are thinner and tend to break if you just look at them the wrong way. Wimps!
Behold imposter DeBoles along with store brand.
Earth’s best (left), teeny tiny store brand (center), DeBoles (right)
We’ve shopped around for other brands — our local Giant has a store brand, but the letters are just too small. Amazon offers several others, but you have to buy a 12-pack for $40 or something. Can’t risk that.
Why, oh why?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Now I may need to get a new job, like selling vacuum cleaners or something. I just can’t see myself making any more pub day soups without my favorite alphabet pasta. 😦
Earth’s Best, I’m hard pressed (and screwed).
Gone to pot,
Jama Rattigan Former Head Soup Maker
(Formerly your biggest fan who bought so much of this product I practically owned stock in the company.)
P.S. If anybody out there can vouch for Ronzoni, DaVinci, Hello Kitty, Racconto, La Moderna, Eden Organic, or any other brand, please let me know. I’m looking for medium sized letters that can stand a little handling, don’t plump up too much after cooking, and will photograph nicely.
#38 in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the alphabet.
You’ve probably already seen this amazing creation around the web, but I would be remiss if I didn’t add it to my collection here — a gingerbread typewriter that’s 100% edible!
It was created by Patti Paige and friends at Baked Ideas in NYC to benefit City Harvest, and is on display at the Parker Meridien Hotel. She and her staff decided to fashion a gingerbread house where letters could live, something remniscent of simpler times: “Christmas unplugged, a letter to Santa, Granny’s laptop.”
First we made a model of the typewriter in cardboard, and then baked all the parts and crafted the roller, paper and metal keys out of sugar paste. The “glue” is royal icing, and cookies, stacked up, are the inner supports. The keyboard letters are cookies, iced in ivory and trimmed in silver. The iced gingerbread alphabet letters are frolicking in the sugar snow, sometimes spelling out words (fun, skip, eat, joy.)
Rear of typewriter reflected in mirror.
Don’t you love the idea of alphabet cookie letters frolicking about? Brilliant! At Baked Ideas, “imagination is the main ingredient.” Check out their website gallery for more examples of their whimsical cookies and cakes. You can also purchase cookies and cookie cutters from their online store.
Since it’s the holidays, here’s another example of their scrumptious work, a Gingerbread Nutcracker (a collaboration with Cake Power). Click here for more fun and Patti’s Gingerbread Cookie recipe. ☺
December just kind of rushed in all of a sudden. Those of you who’ve already finished your holiday shopping, please go away. I’m totally in awe envious of people who are always so organized and ahead of the game.
#36 in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the alphabet.
Today I’m happy to share two fine examples of alphabetica discovered by blogger friends on recent trips abroad.
Mary Lee at A Year of Reading visited Ghent, Belgium, this past summer and encountered this alphabet set on the side of a building. Isn’t it lovely? So glad she snapped a pic. She says she thought of me when she saw it. Sigh. I hope she also thought of me when she ate Belgian chocolate (LOVE that stuff) and french fries (in a paper cone)! ☺
Melodye Shore at Joyful Noise, whose essay is included in the highly acclaimed anthology, Dear Bully(HarperTeen, 2011), traveled to Europe earlier this Fall and was very fortunate to see “La Grande Nomade” while touring the French Riviera. The Man of Letters, an amazingly cool sculpture by Spanish artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa, overlooks Port Vauban in Antibes.
Here’s a bit more about this remarkable installation, which consists of a stainless steel alphabet latticework:
“On the terrace, facing the sea at the corner of the ring wall, is this monumental sculpture eight metres high of a squatting figure. It used the formal vocabularly developed by the artist over the last few years, based on letters. With this vocabulary, Plensa is suggesting that, beyond its simple mission of communicating a meaning, spoken or written language can also be seen as a kind of envelope covering the matter and energy that constitute us. “Like bricks,” he says, “letters have a potential for construction. They enable us to construct thought.”
Visitors are invited to step inside, and travel within it. More from the artist:
I always imagined that our skin is permanently tattooed with text – our life, our experiences – tattooed, but with invisible ink. And then suddenly, somebody is able to decipher these tattoos; that person becoming a lover, a friend. That is probably why I work with sculptures like this, this human form composed solely of letters, like cells. It’s almost biological.
*Swoon* Apparently, there are other Plensa Men of Letters around — one in Des Moines, Iowa, and a grouping of them in Wakefield, England. I think every city should have one!
*drifts off in alphabet reverie*
Thanks so much, Mary Lee and Melodye!
♥ Don’t forget — if you have any notable alphabetical encounters, whether a piece of art, a song, video, abc book, fashion accessory, etc., please let me know so I can add it to my collection!
Certified authentic alphabetica. Handmade for you with love and boing.
Jama's Alphabet Soup 