Instead of fussing with steamed milk and trying to perfect the very difficult skill of making good latte art, which is very tricky to practice unless you have access to a good espresso machine and work in a coffee shop or drink a lot of coffee, a good way to decorate your drinks is with a stencil. Aerolatte sells a Cappuccino Art Set. The art set comes with a collection of stencils that can be placed on top of your drink and dusted with cocoa powder or cinnamon using a fine duster, similar to the type used for sprinkling powdered sugar. The six stencils are made of sturdy plastic, are dishwasher safe and come with a small storage tin. There is only one downside and that is the fact that you are limited to the designs that are provided. As elegant as the premade stencils are, if you want to make your own, you can use the exact same technique (perhaps even the same stencils) that we used for making cupcake stencils a few weeks ago.

These unusual ceramic plates have a couple of different uses and are so visually interesting that it's almost a surprise that they're not in any high-end restaurants, especially one where they deal with less traditional foods and presentations. The Dish It Up dishes come in three sizes that can be fit together along their "cut" edge. They could be used for portion control, if you're looking for a practical purpose to justify buying them and more artistic platings are not your goal. One other interesting feature of the dishes is that they can be stored vertically, resting on their straight edge, which minimizes the amount of cabinet space they take up. They are sold in sets that include one each of the small, medium and large sizes.

If a dinner of pasta sounds dull and ordinary, a new presentation is in order to spice things up. But what alternative is there to spooning the pasta into a bowl? At Lex Culinaria, the presentation problem was solved with a Beehive Pasta Timbale. A timbale is a dome-shaped pastry that is filled with a rich, creamy mixture of vegetables, meat and sauce. Traditionally, they are made out of a type of pie or puff pastry and served sliced into wedges, like a giant meat pie. The casing can be made out of anything that will keep its shape, from rice to potatoes to, in this case, pasta. This timbale was shaped by spiraling rows of cooked ziti pasta around a metal mixing bowl, lined with a meat mixture and filled with pasta, cheese, vegetables and sauce. It is basically guaranteed to be a showstopper at any event. For more photos and the recipe, check out the original post.

For the third installment of their hit series, Top Chef, Bravo wanted to take the competition up a notch by bringing in some very discerning judges: a group of forty 10-year olds. The theme of the whole episode seemed to be to make unappealing food appealing, both visually and taste-wise, to a group of picky eaters, hence the name of the episode: Nasty Delights.

The quickfire challenge, which awards immunity from elimination, at the beginning of the show dealt with octopus. Given a whole octopus, the chefs had 60-minutes to make it look and taste good - a difficult feat on any day, but compounded by the fact that some people had never really dealt with the ingredient before.  Braising seemed to be the cooking method of choice and the guest judge, Laurent Manrique of San Francisco's Aqua restaurant, had a difficult time judging. In fact, there were four dishes that he liked, but Tiffani's traditionally prepared octopus dish, brimming with Mediterranean flavors, was what won her the challenge.