Beauty & The (Edible) Beast

In elementary school, I always liked the weird girls: the ones who would make strange faces on demand or collect slugs on the playground while talking to themselves in made-up dialects. I was in good company, you see: I was usually pretending to be a dinosaur of some kind or making Valentine's Day cards for the other boys in the class with my strawberry-scented marker. Now, as a fully-bloomed adult, it is clear that I was right to be drawn to those weird girls: they grow up to be princesses - weird, macabre, artistically-brilliant princesses with fearless attitudes. One such fearless princess is Christine McConnell.

The photographer and baker, who lives in South Pasadena, Los Angeles, has been called "Tim Burton with a pastry bag" and her rise to quasi-fame has been almost meteoric. She opened an Instagram account last year and has since accumulated more than 100,000 followers. Her Flikr account is equally magnetic. She has been featured in several magazines and prominent websites and book publishers are now hounding her to make a creepy-cookie cookbook. Sounds good to me!

Christine's claim to fame is her peculiar but always-beautiful approach to her photography and her perfectly bizarre confections. (It doesn't hurt, either, that she is a tall, raven-haired beauty with a body to die for!) For her photographs she uses her imagination to its fullest potential but reigns it in with carefully-styled compositions that often reference her favorite films or pockets of popular culture that tickle her fancy. In the photograph directly above, she is channeling Sigourney Weaver in full-on Zuul mode from the Ghostbusters film.

It would be enough if her talents began and ended with photography and modeling. But the real cherry on the cake is...well... the cake! She is a formidable baker who comes up with the most incredible confectionery creations: edible monsters straight out of her imagination or a classic sci-fi hit. (When I saw the sugar cookie she made to look like the facehugger monster from the Alien films, I knew I was in love.) She almost always incorporates her cakes, cookies, pies and tarts in her surrealistic photographs, lending a further layer of scintillation.

(Yes, friends, it's a cookie!)

I suppose this all sounds like ''geekery'' to some of you. But when you live so much inside your head, as I do, it is always inspiring to see the unleashing of an imaginative soul. It is refreshing, too, that this slender, LA-dwelling beauty has the courage to be totally-out-there nuts in a time and place that so often rewards conformity and predictability. I hope she never stops. I'm addicted. And I want to be her friend.