Weekend Reading: Glorious Layer Cakes, How to Win at Brunch, and More

What we’re reading and clicking this week

I'm mesmerized by these foods painted to look like other foods by artist Hikaru Cho—a banana that looks like a cucumber, a tomato that's painted to resemble a tangerine, and a tiny eggplant that breaks to reveal an egg yolk. —Laura Sant

Baked eggs rule, as Sarah Karnasiewicz demonstrates for the Wall Street Journal's "Off Duty" section. Try both of the dueling baked egg recipes—you will win your weekend brunch. —Karen Shimizu

The Green Mill in Chicago is a place of legend: A legendary bar, a legendary jazz club, a legendary part of the city's history. The century-old joint is one of my favorite places in all the world to sip a cocktail, and it gets the treatment it deserves in a gritty, reverential, inspiring, utterly lovely oral history in the Chicago Reader—Al Capone's secret booze-running tunnels, used needles in the picture frames, glorious music, and all. —Helen Rosner

As I read about the glorious, down-south layer-cakes in Wendell Brock's Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, I could almost taste the towering architectural wonders built by fabulous southern cooks Linda Weiss, Natalie Bristol Kirbo, and former SAVEUR staffer, Ben Mims. It was enough to evoke some serious sugar cravings even in me, someone without much of a sweet tooth, so sweets-lovers beware. —Felicia Campbell

Talk about girl power! In Japan's Yamagata prefecture, seven young women run The Yamagata Girls Farm where they grow vegetables and rice and sell baked goods made from their produce. It's only appropriate that Modern Farmer should cover the story—these ladies are changing the face of Japanese farming. —Zoe Schaeffer

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I am super-duper psyched to enroll in this free online course by the eminent food historian and Saveur contributor Andrew Smith about America's greatest food innovators. I am always hungry for more information on the likes of Julia Child, James Beard, Judith Jones, and Henri Soulé. —Betsy Andrews

Blogger and fungi educator Kevin Hovey has a Kickstarter fund up and running for Chicago's first funded mushroom cultivation lab. The special conditions and costs associated with cultivating mushrooms from tissue cultures keep most farmers from investing the time and money necessary to grow them. A mushroom lab staffed with trained volunteers will assist urban growers with the resources they need to start their mushroom crops from scratch. —Judy Haubert