Love those addictive Bloomin' Onions from Outback Steakhouse but feel like a fatty eating a whole one by yourself? Then try making this little baby ones with pearl onions...just try not to eat 40 of them all at once.

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Eat them before they eat you! To their misfortune, Rhiannon made these Piranha Plants too tasty for their own good. The heads are made of compressed dark chocolate and raspberry cupcakes and the bases from brownies. You can find her full recipe at the link.

Link-via it8bit

We have only a few days to wait until the glorious return of the Twinkie! That's just enough time to do the prep work to duplicate Beth Klosterboer's amazing Snack Cake Stingers. You'll need modeling chocolate, food coloring, Nutella and a few food art tools. You can see her process photos at the link.

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For the last Super Bowl, Nabisco hired the Brooklyn-based artist Alexander Barrett and other artists to make sculptures out of Oreo cookies. Their subject matter was chosen by people following the Oreo brand on Instagram. They sent in photos to duplicate with Oreo cookies. You can see more sculptures in the series at the link.

Link -via Foodiggity

UPDATE 7.14.13: Chris Durso of Foodiggity kindly emails to inform us that these are works of several artists, not just Alexander Barrett. I've altered the post to reflect this information.

A croissant mixed with a donut? That's cool, but a croissant with a delicious double stuffed Oreo cookie inside? Now that's brilliant!

The Crookie was created by Clafouti Patisserie et Cafe, and now, I want to go to there.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Stop licking the website, please. Back away.

Thank you.

Now, to business: this is Dorothy's pie built on a crust of crushed Oreo cookies and pretzels. On it she layered ice cream, peanut butter, hot fudge, caramel, chocolate sauce and sprinkles.

Link -via Love from the Oven

We at Neatorama are of the opinion that pretty much anything sloth-related is adorable, but this cake might be an exception given those horrorific vampire teeth and the fact that he's urging a bunch of strawberry chicks to sacrifice one of their own to the devil.

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Emma Thomas, AKA Miss Cakehead, does amazing work in her kitchen. We've already seen her life-size Dexter cake and nearly full-size train cake. She's entertained people. Now she's going to help heal them.

Miss Cakehead is participating in The Depressed Cake Shop project, a program of baking events at locations throughout the UK to raise money for mental health charities. Many of her contributions will be sweets that are grey on the outside and vibrantly colored inside. She writes:

One in four people will suffer from mental illness at some point in their lives – The Depressed Cake shop will provide a unique platform on which to raise awareness of and discuss mental health issues (with a focus on depression), whilst at the same time raising valuable funds for a mental health charity.  It will open up discussion about mental illness, and engage people with the issues that stems from this disease, making sure people DO talk about the issues.

The symptoms of depression can be complex – and vary widely – and so will our cakes. But as a general rule, if you are depressed, you feel sad, hopeless and lose interest in things you used to enjoy. The professional and hobby bakers contributing work to this event will be creating cakes that visually represent this… For example barely decorated cakes or cookies will communicate how depression can affect your ability to work, the grey & dull consistent color scheme that all fun can disappear from life. This will be a cake shop like nothing else seen before, the grey sad looking but delicious tasting cakes powerfully demonstrating the effects of depression.

Many of our cakes will also be made by those with personal experiences of depression, using baking as a way of expressing their struggles with, and experiences of, the illness.  Through seeking sponsorship we also aim to hold a series of baking therapy sessions around the UK, and set up a support network for those who use baking to help combat depression.

Link and News Story -via Amanda Brennan

It looks like a cake covered with disgusting savory toppings, but it's actually a tasty layered sandwich with smoked trout mousse, smoked salmon, cucumbers, mustard sauce and topped with a sour cream and cream cheese "frosting" and salmon, shrimp, eggs, radishes and parsley. Even if you aren't big on the fish filling, try your favorite sandwich fillings instead...just imagine a Reuben Smorgastarta. It might not be authentic, but man would it be satisfying.

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We've covered deep-fried fair food every year, always uncovering the latest abomination as vendors experiment with just what can be deep-fried and sold on a stick. Food on a stick makes perfect sense for fairgoers, as it makes eating without a table or utensils easier. But there are many things that should never be deep-fried. Rusty Blazenhoff brings us a report of 2013 treats as seen at the Alameda County Fair. Deep-fried Pop Tarts on a stick just seems like a waste of batter. The chicken-fried steak on a stick sounds good, but traditionally includes gravy, which wouldn't work at a fair. And a deep-fried cheeseburger? Since we put burgers on a bun to eat them with one hand in the first place, that just seems silly. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Rusty Blazenhoff)

What could be better than a tasty cinnamon-sugar pastry? A cinnamon-sugar pastry mixed with cheesecake. According to the recipe creator, "two squares later these babies changed my life!" 

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This Predator cake by Kupkake Tree looks horrifyingly real, but unlike the real Predator, we humans actually stand a chance against this one. In fact, it will actually provide us with a tasty treat instead of our own gruesome deaths.

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You already know Hank Hill's answer: gas. That's also what Wired editor Mark McClusky thinks. He argues that "grilling over gas is scientifically, objectively better than grilling over charcoal." McClusky explains:

And radiant heat is what’s really cooking your food on a grill. That’s why gas grills use some sort of surface to create radiation, whether it’s lava rocks or ceramic plates or the “Flavorizer Bars” on my Weber. These surfaces are heated by the gas flame, creating the radiant heat generated naturally by charcoal.

Charcoal purists will try and tell you that their preferred fuel leads to better flavor. This is, well, nonsense.

Your food doesn’t know what’s creating the heat below it, and once charcoal is hot, there aren’t any aromatic compounds left in the coals. According to the food science bible Modernist Cuisine, “Carbon is carbon; as it burns, it imparts no flavor of its own to the food being grilled.”

The characteristic flavor of grilled food comes from the drippings, not the fuel. When those drippings hit the heat source below, the oils, sugars, and proteins burst into smoke and flame. That heat creates new complex molecules that rise in the smoke and warm air to coat the food you’re grilling.

Nothing in that process relies on charcoal.

But Joe Brown, the New York editor of Wired, takes the opposite view:

What charcoal brings to the party is a healthy heaping of aroma compounds, the other half of the power couple that is flavor. In fact, aroma might be the super starlet in that relationship, because our tongues are actually pretty limited. “There are only five taste receptors that are well-agreed-upon to exist within your taste buds,” says Sacks. He’s referring to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the new kid: umami.

Anything else you perceive while eating — that smoky deliciousness, for example — is courtesy of aroma.

Aromas are released when you bite into your food. They travel up your retronasal cavity, and light up your olfactory receptors. That neurological signal mixes with whatever your taste buds are saying and tells your brain what’s going on in your mouth.

Of course, even food cooked on a gas grill gives off aromas — all food does. But food grilled over a charcoal flame has a special one: guaiacol.

Guaiacol is an aroma compound produced when you use heat to break down lignin, the resin responsible for holding strands of cellulose together to form wood. “It has a smoky, spicy, bacony aroma,” says Sacks. “In fact, the flavor that most people associate with bacon is largely degraded lignin.”

Translation: Cooking over charcoal makes your food taste like bacon. Let me repeat that: blah blah charcoal blah blah BACON.

-via Glenn Reynolds

(Image: Grill Sergeant Apron, now on sale at the NeatoShop!)

Elvis' favorite sandwich was always one filled with bacon, peanut butter and banana, but really, who wants to deal with all that boring bread? Thanks to Dude Foods, we now have a much more pure version to enjoy. Plus, it's low-carb and gluten free, so it's a perfect diet snack, something the late king would have appreciated.

Link Via Foodbeast

We know beer is one of the oldest concoctions man has ever made, but it has been improved a lot over those thousands of years. Have you ever wondered what ancient beer tasted like? A collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Great Lakes Brewing Company aimed to find out. They used a 5,000-year-old recipe from a Sumerian poem to make a batch of ancient brew.  

To help ensure authenticity, they even used recreations of ancient wooden tools and ceramic fermentation pots based on artifacts found in Iraq in the 1930s, malted the barley on a roof, and hired a baker in Cleveland to prepare the bappir (“beer bread”) they used as the source of their yeast. And they heated the beer during the brewing process the old fashioned way: over a manure-fueled fire.

How did it turn out? Find out at Uncle John's Bathroom Reader blog. Link