Terrific Cakes: Firestarter’s Scorched Sampler Tower
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Firestarter
Have you ever seen Firestarter?
Have you ever heard of Firestarter?
Chances are, in the times before streaming, you caught part of this movie on TV. You were flipping through the channels, saw a volleyball of flaming char race along a string into a miniature of a plantation house, and were just about to flip the channel when you caught yourself saying, “Is that Drew Barrymore?”
It was. It is.
Firestarter is the 1984 adaptation of Stephen King’s book of the same name. According to Goodreads I read it and gave it three out of five stars.
Here’s the thing about that: I give EVERYTHING on Goodreads five stars. The review section of Goodreads skews too close to Amazon’s “it took me forty-eight hours to put together this grill - 1 star” kind of reviews, so I don’t trust its authority. At the same time, I know authors are judged on ratings by their publishers, thus granting an outsized power to people whose opinions are suspect at best. My auto-five stars are an attempt to balance out these armchair critics. The only things that don’t get five stars are books I can’t finish and books I CAN’T with.
I’m sure I finished Firestarter.
So… three stars… on Goodreads… with no memory of the book… is a bad sign.
But the movie? Solid three stars in the best way.
This screen grab tells me everything I need to know about the movie: that I’ll love it.
A Theatrical Movie made for TV
As discussed in my Poltergeist: I’ve Been Twaumatized post, there are just certain horror movies that were made to watch on a sunny Saturday afternoon. A movie you’ve never seen the first ten minutes of. A TBS level of terror.
Watching Firestarter, unedited, from the beginning, was an interesting exercise. This movie that I thought I knew so well had so much more than I remembered. So many little scenes. So many more characters?
For example: Heather Locklear is in this movie.
Did I know that?
She’s only in the first fifteen to twenty minutes and only in flashback. It’s possible that of the thirty times I’ve seen this movie, I may have caught her in it less than five. Such was the magic of the Saturday afternoon movie marathon.
The movie runs 114 minutes, and it feels looooooong. It speeds up and slows down over at least five distinct acts (running from the feds, finding the farm house, escaping to the lake, trapped by the government, destruction of the facility). It feels long, despite the great efforts of the incredible cast: David Keith, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott, Art Carney, Louise Fletcher. Drew Barrymore (I don’t think I need to give you a link to Drew Barrymore), at six years old, is unbelievable. She’s emotive, funny, and endearing. She has a gravitas to her character that suggests a child that has really lived through trauma.
But despite the efforts of multiple academy award winners, the movie is too long. It feels bloated and slow and top heavy.
It needs a good edit.
It needs a cable network to come in and chop it down to ninety minutes of content.
I’m not the only one to bemoan the scourge of 2 hour+ movies over the last few years, but going through my Terrific Cakes has exposed an unpleasant truth about this trend: it’s not a trend.
Movie makers have been bloating their films with repetitive exposition, two too many fight scenes, and torturous, lingering death scenes forever. This isn’t a new trend. The movies I watched used to be shorter. They were shorter because I digested them after the scalpel of a cable network trimmed them into a neat 2-hour block. These two hours included at least half an hour for commercials.
In Firestarter there are probably three too many scenes in the facility. There’s definitely about ten too many shots of fireballs running along strings and blowing people backwards. And although Drew is a dream, the camera lingers overlong on almost every shot between father and daughter.
At one point I literally yelled, “I GET IT! MOVE ON!” at the screen.
And yet….
I didn’t dislike it. I just needed it cut down.
Did cable movie marathons ruin me for long movies, or was there an alchemical refinement my generation was raised on that got lost as we moved from cable programming to on-demand entertainment? These edits weren’t all good. After all, I didn’t even know what about stamens going berserk until college! That was cut for TV so hard it left a scar.
Overall, Firestarter is fine. I’d even call it fine to good. If you’ve never seen it, you should set your Tivo to record it on TV and watch it in it’s best iteration: cut down another 25%.
Firestarter is definitely FAR FAR better than most Stephen King adaptations, despite Mr. King’s personal opinion on the matter, but that discussion is best left for the future. It’s best left for It… in two(ish) weeks. You’ll want to grab your coffee and take a restroom break before we get into that.
I’m not convinced Heather Locklear wasn’t edited out for television.
Scorched Sampler Tower
Ironically, one of the things I absolutely did NOT do for Firestarter was edit myself.
So many big eyes and furrowed brows.
It all looks so orderly…
I’ve been meaning to make a Basque cheesecake for a while now, and I knew Thalia Ho (easily my favorite cookbook author of the last few years) had a recipe for one. It seemed like an obvious answer to go with this, but I didn’t feel like it was enough.
So I added a cake layer.
And a blondie layer.
And a chocolate layer.
And a marshmallow layer.
At some point I thought I’d made something akin to a s’mores cake, but what I made was so much more monstrous, so much more delicious, so much MORE than that.
A Tower of Terrific
Baking as Geological Survey
After I’d decided on the recipes to make, the next question became how to assemble them into a single entity.
I’ve had a lot of cakes collapse under my ambitions. A lot of filling has burst from the sides of my machinations like so much viscera.
So how to avoid that fate with these three disparate desserts?
When assembling desserts you need to think about what’s going to happen when the pressure of the knife plunges into the heart of your bake. Where will it hit resistance? Where will the pressure be alleviated? Will the layers on the bottom absorb the force without collapsing? Will they hold steady until it’s their time to be severed?
I knew the Basque cheesecake would be the most likely element to fall apart, so it would have to go on top. The blondie would be the firmest and the most difficult to cut, so it would have to go on the bottom, especially since it would have a ganache disc sitting atop it. This left the cinnamon cake in the middle.
Firm blondie, hard chocolate, spongey cake, and souffle-like cheesecake.
There. Easy.
5 Kilos of Cheesecake
What I didn’t take into consideration was just how heavy the cheesecake would be.
According to the recipe, this cheesecake’s ingredients clock in around 2015 grams, or about 4.5 lbs.
I swear this cheesecake ate its twin in utero because it felt more like ten pounds.
I was confident the cheesecake would smash the cinnamon cake beneath it into a pancake, or at least collapse outward under the weight of its own scorched topping.
I overcooked the cinnamon cake just a little bit (perhaps two minutes too long until it really pulled away from the pan) and chilled it in the freezer for half an hour before I placed the cheesecake on top.
And that worked. The cake didn’t collape. The cheesecake didn’t splay out.
The engineering worked… if the frosting didn’t.
Write in Your Cookbooks: Shame on Me
When I read this recipe for seven-minute frosting (from America’s Test Kitchen’s Perfect Cake), I had a sinking feeling.
I go to Perfect Cake quite often for base recipes to alter and adapt. It’s an incredibly reliable book with great recipes. It’s one of the books that made me a more confident baker.
But it’s not without its fault.
Despite the little baking devil on my shoulder warning me about this recipe, I convinced myself this was a good seven-minute frosting recipe. Surely it must be! I knew I’d made it before, and there were no notes in the margins.
It wasn’t a good recipe.
My good recipe is from American Cake.
I realized this about halfway through, but I rarely remake things once the ingredients are consumed. So I soldiered on. It failed. I got soup.
But it did make a pretty adorable slimey-smile for my scorched tower, so not all was lost.
My cookbook now has a large “X” through this recipe. Most of my cookbooks have this somewhere in them.
All recipes are written with a certain assumption of knowledge on the part of the baker, so it’s absolutely possible that I don’t possess the unwritten wisdom needed to make this recipe work, or there’s an assumption about the tools I’m using that is unspoken. If I had to guess, it’s probably related to holding the sugar syrup for a certain time under temperature, but the recipe is only concerned with getting to a certain temperature.
Maybe? Maybe not?
Who knows? Definitely not me as crime scene photography shows!
Video Vixen
No elaborate costumes or sets this time around. Just a boy with a jean jacket, a Minnesota State Fair t-shirt, and a Christmas cookie belly pushing against the cotton.
This was one of my most unplanned shoots, and it honestly was a breeze to edit and felt easier to shoot and produce than the others have.
I guess that makes sense. This is my eighth (!) Terrific Cake, which in some ways doesn’t sound like much, but in many many many more ways feels like an astronomical achievement.
I thought twenty-five cakes would be a nice, achievable goal, and I have been astonished at how much time and mental capacity these cakes, videos, and posts take.
But in a good way?
It’s hard to describe the sense of pride without ego that these cakes are bringing out in me. I care so much about them. I try very hard on making them unique and interesting. I want people so badly to see them.
But I’m not consumed by the number of likes or views. I feel proud when you all tell me you read this or watch my videos, but… I think I’ll finish this even if no one ever says another word to me about it. It’s for me as much as it’s for everyone else, and yet it’s the most public, social-media-forward thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s confining because of the public commitment but mentally freeing because it gives me so much joy (and cake to eat).
And all these feelings only on the eighth cake! What kind of transcendental nonsense will we find ourselves at by twenty-five…
I predict at some point a “what is the point of this” spiral… so let’s just ride this high while it’s here.
Recipes and Sources
Although this cake may be more Frankenstein than Firestarter, I am happy to say that multiple people who had this cake called it “smokey.”
We did it, Drew. We did it.
SCORCHED SAMPLER TOWER
If you’d like to recreate my Scorched Sampler Tower, you’ll need to have 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer for her s’mores blondie, Wild Sweetness by Thalia Ho for her scorched cheesecake, and A Good Bake by Melissa Weller for her white cake. I added liquid smoke and cinnamon to Melissa Weller’s white cake to give it that scorched sentimentality.
Alternatively, take your favorite brownie or blondie(make sure it’s firm and not too goey!), cake, and cheesecake recipes to make your own sample monster.
Calculate all your recipes to be a single shape and size.
The Basque Cheesecake I made was written for a 9” pan, so I adapted Sarah Kieffer’s s’mores blondie from a rectangle to a circle by calculating difference in area. I did a similar thing for Melissa Weller’s white cake by taking her recipe for two 8” layers and making enough batter for only one 9” layer.
I swear this is easier than it sounds. If you made it past eighth grade, you 100% were taught how to do this.
Example: An eight inch round cake pan is approximately 50 square inches. A nine inch round cake pan is appoximately 64 inches. If a recipe calls for two eight inch round cake pans, that’s approximately 100 square inches. That means I need to use only 64% of the recipe if I want to make a single 9” round cake. I usually round up a little, so in this case I did 2/3 of the recipe since it was easier to calculate. The cooking time always goes up with bigger pans and down with smaller, but it doesn’t change as much as you’d think. Cooking time does change A LOT when you change shapes, though (round to square, rectangle to round, etc.). Adapting to new sizes is easiest when weighing ingredients, especially with things like eggs. For eggs, it’s just a matter of cracking them into a bowl and taking some of the matter out to get to your needed weight. This can also be a good spot to look for smarter rounding: if a recipe calls for four eggs and you need 45% of the recipe for your pans, just round up to 50% and do two eggs. A little extra batter usually just means longer cooking and a higher final rise.
Make your blondie, cake, and cheesecake.
Chill your cake in the freezer for half an hour and your cheesecake in the fridge for an hour to make handling easier.
Make a stiff frosting to sandwich between the layers. Ideally this frosting should not be too sweet as we’re already combining so many flavors.
Put a dollop of frosting on a cake stand or plate and place your blondie round down.
You may have to exert a significant amount of force to cut through your brownie/blondie layer, so make sure you are using a sturdy cakestand. Additionally, it’s probably safest to use a cake plate without a lip in case your knife breaks through with force and cracks the stand.
Smooth half your frosting over the blondie and place your cake on top.
Smooth the other half of your frosting on the cake and bring it just to the edge with an offset spatula.
Place this assemblage in the fridge for ten minutes to help the frosting firm before you place nearly five pounds of cheesecake on top of it.
Place cheesecake on top.
Laugh.
Place eyes.
Laugh harder.
This “cake” is easiest to cut at room temperature, but should be stored in the fridge.
Devour.
Leave no witnesses.
Don’t be fooled by that terrible trailer. It is a truly terrific blend of monster movie and comedy. Great performances. Incredible story-telling. Practical effects galore. WATCH TREMORS!
