After a summer out in the rocky mountains, I often thought about how the mountains looked like a delicious dessert. The snow looked like frosting; the rocks looked like chocolate chunks. I described this “landscape desserts” idea to a friend of mine, down to the aquamarine Jell-O that could be used for the water at the base.

This friend was a maker of crafts, and one year she made exactly the type of thing I had described for me as a Christmas present. So I can’t take the credit for the execution, but I can say that it turned out pretty much exactly how I imagined it.

Although there aren’t a lot of lone mountains on islands as depicted here, there are some limits to what you can do when the whole thing has to go in a pan.