You never know who you might meet when judging a wedding cake contest at the Chocolate Festival in Denver on Mother’s Day weekend. For me it was meeting Andrew Novick, who was serving as a judge for the cupcake category.

My first thought when we were introduced was that he was a member of a punk rock band based on his hair style. It was memorable with a mostly closely cropped do with chunks of longish sprigs here and there, sort of like hair extensions.

However, I learned he was judging cupcakes because of his creative flair for cupcake recipes. Think, for instance, mochi cupcakes. Mochi are balls of sweet, glutinous rice that is a favorite sweet in Japan. Not something you’d first think of as a cupcake filling. Another reason he was in the judge’s corner was because he was going to do a cooking demonstration at the event, Andrew Novick’s X-Treme Confection Creation. The sponsor was the Denver County Fair of which he serves as entertainment director.

“I’m going to make chocolate spaghetti,” he said.

This was something I had to see. Then he passed me a card about his Food Face photography show that was opening the next evening at the GroundSwell gallery in Denver.

“This may not be the most appetizing thing to see right before tasting cake,” he apologized.

The front of the card was attention getting. It had a photo of him pressing saucy meatballs into his eyes with forks.

“I’m into all sorts of things,” he said, “things like outrageous stuff with food. This exhibition of pictures is about food as shock makeup.”

I had to see this too, but first I grabbed a front row seat for his X-Treme Confection Creation show.

“Do you know what molecular gastronomy is?” He asked the dozen or so of us in the audience. “It’s making interesting things with food that fools the eye. Like making a peanut butter bowl for chocolate spaghetti that I’m going to show you tonight.”

He melted peanut butter chips in a small pan.

“To make the bowl I’ll blow up a balloon,” he said. “Actually, I going to blow up several balloons since they could break if the peanut butter is too hot when I smear it on the balloon.”

Sure enough, the first peanut butter bowl attempt burst the balloon. He let the mixture cool a little longer before smearing the round bottom of the balloon with a layer of peanut butter. That was placed to the side to complete cool.

Next up, chocolate spaghetti.

“I ordered a molecular gastronomy kit online,” he said. “It has everything you need for this dish except the white chocolate.”

He melted white chocolate chips and added agar-agar.

“This is the magic,” he said referring to the agar-agar. “It’s Japanese gelatin that will make the chocolate more like soft Jell-O when it cools. It came in my kit but you can buy it drug stores or grocery stores.”

He used a fat plastic syringe to pipe the white chocolate into long plastic tubes. Once the gelatin has set he used the empty syringe to push air through the tubes to shove the white chocolate “spaghetti” out. In the meantime he had popped the balloon to release the peanut butter bowl. He swirled the fake pasts into the bowl.

“Now what would spaghetti be without meatballs and sauce?” He said.

He rolled nuggets of granola in melted dark chocolate to make little meatball-looking things and drizzled strawberry jam on for a saucy look.

You too can have fun with food by ordering a kit from molecule-r.co for $58.95. If you’re interested in seeing some bizarre food photograph catch Novick’s show at the gallery, 3121 E. Colfax Ave. in Denver 7-10 p.m. through June 6. Visit groundswellgallery.com.

Oh yeah, Novick was in a punk rock band, the Warlock Pinchers, back in the day. His day job is an electrical engineer for a company in Boulder. During fair days last year he organized Andrew Novick’s X-Treme Pancake Breakfast where he served about 500 people in 2 hours, with more than 60 toppings and 14 flavors of butter.

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Contact Teresa J. Farney at 636-0271, Twitter @tffoodie, Facebook Teresa Farney