This white cratered moon is actually a densely filled ice cream cake created by London designers Doshi Levien for Häagen-Dazs.
Ice cream is an indulgence when you’re sitting on a sofa in sweat pants eating it with a spoon straight out of the pint container, but the treat can be so, so much more decadent. When Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien of London-based office Doshi Levien were approached by Haagen-Dazs about a unique collaboration, the opportunity to experiment with the frozen dessert was too sweet to resist. “I thought the meeting place between material technology and food culture was really interesting,” Levien tells Co.Design. “So we accepted.”
Each Ice Moon is pitted with smooth craters. Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien say they were inspired by Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune, Armenian surrealist Léon Tutundjian’s relief work of 1929, a childhood Bollywood song and the near-spherical shapes of early ice cream bombes. “The moon idea came from many different places and has elements of fantasy, adventure and imagination,” they say.
The white moon consists of a pistachio biscuit base, layers of macadamia nut ice cream and meringue and a coating of raspberry ice cream. The orange moon has crunchy chocolate at the bottom, layers of nutty ice cream and salted caramel and a coating of vanilla ice cream.
“Our concept is almost spherical, so the ice cream has to be moulded in two separate parts and then put together without seeing the join,” explain the designers. “We love the ephemeral nature of ice cream and design to be eaten; we never had a design meeting before in which we ate the prototype.”
