This thing was delicious! A large cookie base, rich taffy, thinly sliced green apples, topped with caramel and crushed peanuts.
This photo was actually quite simple to do. First you need to look at the focus. If you were to shoot this with out a view camera or a tilt shift lens, you couldn’t get the focus to follow the cut line. You can see the cut line is sharp, and the focus falls off at an angle. If this were shot with a fixed lens and you wanted the cut to be in focus, you would have a lot more of your cookie in focus as well. But that wasn’t an option for us. So we swung the lens to match the angle of the cut and shot wide open.
Regarding lighting, one of the big things we needed,was for that caramel to come alive. To do so, we knew that we needed some great incidence on it, so we started with a large soft light source behind. This gave us 1 large unbroken highlight. We then put a point light source from the back right to give us some direction. Fill in with a soft light from directly above to control contrast, and you basically have what we did. We did take it a step further and add in a point light source from the front right to skim the edge of the cookie cut dos how the texture.
If you wanted to make something similar to this, take a look at the following recipe.
- 1 package (18 ounces) refrigerated sugar cookie dough
- 1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 2 medium Granny Smith apples
- 1/4 cup caramel ice cream topping
- 1/2 cup peanuts, chopped
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Shape cookie dough into a ball and place in center of Pizza Stone. Roll out dough to a 14-inch circle, about 1/4 inch thick. Bake 16-18 minutes or until light golden brown. Remove from oven; cool 10 minutes. Carefully loosen cookie from baking stone; cool completely on baking stone.
- Combine cream cheese, brown sugar, peanut butter and vanilla in a mixing bowl and mix well. Spread cream cheese mixture evenly over cookie.
- Peel, core and slice apples. Cut apple slices in half and arrange evenly over cream cheese mixture.
- Microwave ice cream topping on HIGH 30-45 seconds or until warm; drizzle evenly over apples. Chop peanuts; sprinkle over apples.