Terrific Cakes: Pennywise’s Patriotic Poke Cake
Jump to the cake!
First, a Flashback
This movie and cake broke my brain.
For those of you not new to Terrific Cakes, it’s been almost one full year since my last cake celebrating Tremors.
Why?
Hmmm… good question.
As described in the post announcing Terrific Cakes (which ironically used a GIF of Pennywise), sometimes my brain gets too-much-ified. In 2023 I became Creative Director of a local non-profit and thought I’d negotiated myself into a part-time role that would help me balance my passion and my work. Instead, I quickly began working more than full-time and somehow falling farther and farther behind the lofty ambitions of the organization. I’m happy to say it all culminated in an incredible public festival, but like the year before, it really broke me. I was left even more exhausted, frustrated, and, frankly, isolated due to the nature of my creative work. It was incredibly hard, but after a few months trying to recover from the event, I made the decision to step away. In hindsight, because of the structure, the resources, and my passion for the work, it was a recipe for burnout.
I took a few months to connect with my personal creative work again and I’m feeling in a better place.
This all happened to crescendo right as the movie I was most anxious about came up in Terrific Cakes, so I was more than happy to avoid IT for almost a year… but… why?
What is IT?
I assume most people are familiar with Stephen King’s killer clown that lives in the sewer. The idea of a killer clown is so ubiquitous in American Culture and Stephen King has been such a major part of pop culture for nearly fifty years that I think even the most horror-averse know there is something about a clown in a sewer killing people. They might not know its name is Pennywise. They might not know that it’s a shapeshifter that feeds on fear.
But what is it?
It was a novel published in 1986 (two years after I was born). At over 1100 pages, many people consider It King’s magnum opus, although there are a lot of contenders for that crown. It was adapted for TV in 1990 as a two-night special event miniseries. It was also adapted into two films released in 2017 and 2019 call It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two. The story bounces back and forth between adult and child versions of its protagonists as they battle a seemingly omnipotent monster that feeds on the children of Derry by first terrorizing them. It is a dense, immensely readable, often problematic, nostalgic, gruesome, coming-of-age epic tale of good vs. evil battling through time and consciousness.
I didn’t read It until I was nearly thirty, but I probably saw the made-for-TV movie with Tim Curry either when it came out in 1990 or very soon thereafter. It seems wild to think my parents let a five year old watch It, but the adaptation was on primetime network television. It has almost no gore. No swearing. Watching it again, the movie is about as scary as Beetlejuice. It’s silly, campy, and broad with visual effects that make it pretty laughable.
And yet…
What is IT?
The first nightmare I can remember was about an ice cream truck driver murdering my family and friends (never me) with a machine gun while I hid in a cave and listened to them scream. I was perhaps five when I had this dream. I’m pretty sure it came before Pennywise, or at least Pennywise in media that I would have seen.
When a generation of early-80’s babies watched IT, it really stuck with us. It’s a fun generation test to ask people if they remember this movie. Either elder millenials’ parents wisely kept this movie from them and they barely remember it, or they are one of the many kids that saw this and were scarred and intrigued by it.
Scarred because it is a deeply disturbing thing to watch characters your age get attacked, terrorized, and eaten. Intrigued because it’s scary, but empowering. Pennywise is both omnipresent but curiously absent throughout the story. It seems to be everywhere it needs to be for the plot to move forward, but it also allows the children to find each other and grow stronger. It attacks them but runs and hide as soon as it’s confronted. It’s an apex predator that panics when bopped on the nose.
No matter how scary It was to a five year old, there is something about the story that made me come back to it over and over again. There is a valuable lesson in seeing how terrifying and insurmountable Pennywise looms before it is overcome by a group of friends standing up to their bully. It was okay to be scared. The children of Derry should be scared. The monster absolutely could and would eat them if given the chance.
But it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they’d die. The biggest bad could be defeated.
And let’s face it, if you got to the end of the miniseries and saw the terrible claymation spider, it made you feel almost silly about how scared you were of the clown at the beginning.
That’s Nice, but…What IS IT?!
That’s the question everyone wants an answer to, isn’t it?
It’s a question that circles around It in all its iterations because, despite the simple idea of a killer clown attacking kids, It has lasting power more than maybe any other piece of Stephen King’s catalog. (One could argue that The Shining has even more impact, but I’d argue Kubrick’s adaptation has the staying power, NOT the actual story… although the story is INCREDIBLE. Also this note for Carrie…) I’ve read and heard interpretations about It as a stand-in for puberty, death, sexuality, growing up, the patriarchy, inherited trauma, and on and on.
To all of those I say “Yes, and…”
Pennywise shifts shapes to adapt to its victims fears, and in a genius way, so does It.
When I was young, Pennywise was stranger danger. This movie came out one year after the abduction of Jacob Wetterling and ten years after the birth of Satanic Panic. As a child in Minnesota during this time, these events were both constantly in mind, and yet not restricting at all. My friends and I still rode bikes around town with the general rule of “be within range of me yelling your name for lunch” or “be back before the street light turns on.” We were aware of an aura of danger but it didn’t stop us from playing in places we probably shouldn’t, just like the kids in Derry. The only time I was ever scared was at night, alone, in my bed. The world didn’t scare me as much as what my mind did to me in the dark.
When I read IT around thirty, I was amazed at how much Pennywise receded and the horror of the book became about time and memory. While reading the 1100ish page book I was bombarded by flashbacks to middle school and high school, a generally unpleasant time for most people and definitely a hard time for someone as queer as me in as small and Christian a town I grew up in. About halfway through the novel, in a wave of sadness, I suddenly remembered a friend I hadn’t thought about for years. Not just any friend either, but arguably my best friend from eighth grade through twelfth grade. We’d started growing apart senior year and we ended the friendship with a cruelty that guaranteed we’d never speak to each other again. From 20 until 30 I didn’t think about her. I didn’t remember her. Like the childhood memories of the Loser Squad, my brain had simply snipped out this integral part of my experience. When I remembered her, I cried for a long time not because of a desire to reconnect, but because of how easily my mind had repressed this integral part of my adolescence. It cracked open my brain to a level of horror that it’s probably never recovered from. It exposed my mind as fallible and forgetful, instilling in me a fear of death that I really struggled with for the next five or six years.
And now this latest viewing of It…
I thought I’d only watch the miniseries again (which I did), but I also revisited the remakes.
And this time….
This time It was glaringly the town of Derry. It was all the towns like Derry all over America. Small minded communities that bury their head in the sand about their own failures no matter what the cost. The remake, especially Chapter One, does a great job of showing the adults as agents of fear just as much as Pennywise. In Chapter Two, the realistic hate crime that opens the film is even more poignant when it becomes obvious that Pennywise is not causing the violence, it’s just capitalizing on the hatred already taking place. Pennywise is as much scavenger as predator. It came to Derry and found a species that attacks its own. Derry weakens its children by turning a blind eye to bullying and abuse allowing them to be picked off by the predator in its sewer. Derry will never stop Pennywise from feeding because that would expose their culpability in its predation. They’ve gone along to get along for so long that to confront the issue now would devastate the foundation of who they are.
I didn’t grow up in a town with a killer clown in the sewer, but I did grow up in a town where I was called “faggot” nearly every day from sixth grade until I graduated high school. I remember boys coughing “faggot” at me when I answered questions in class and teachers turning back to their white board, pretending they didn’t hear it. I stopped raising my hand in classes to participate in ninth grade and its honestly still something I struggle to do in groups. I once begged my science teacher to move my assigned seat because the boy next to me took my notebook and wrote “fags get aids” on it in sharpie (he also spent most of class whispering under his breath the violent things he and his friends were going to do to me), but my teacher told me he couldn’t give me special treatment by moving my seat. I’m sure there were other teachers that stood up for me, or perhaps helped me in ways I never heard about, but the thing I remember all these years later are the adults that turned their backs on me and let me be abused.
Like the Loser Squad, though, I fought back. I wasn’t nice. In fact, a lot of fall out I’ve had since high school was people contacting me and saying I was a bully to them. I’m sure I was. When I learned that I could hit the shark in the nose to get it to run away, I struck out at the people who said things to me… then I said things to their friends… then I cast a shield of cruelty around myself to make sure no one else would try to get in. I’m sure there are plenty of people I hurt in my attempt at self preservation. I’m sure part of me ultimately ended my friendship with my best friend because of a slight she made. Because I thought us growing apart might hurt me, I made sure to hurt her first and walk away rather than address the root cause.
Honestly, I hope the people I hurt forgot about me. I hope they don’t remember me and that they’ll never get a call that causes a flashback where I said something eviscerating, or humiliating, or unnecessarily harsh to them. I hope they don’t remember feeling small, or stupid, or exposed because of me.
So what It is, ultimately, seems almost a quantum problem. We know It when we see It.
“See you in your dreams.”
Patriotic Poke Cake
Being overwhelmed by the institutional horror of Derry, I couldn’t help but think about the horror movie that our political system has been since the rise of MAGAism. If this is where you check out because you think I’m being biased, I really question how you thought a queer, NYC-living, small-town evacuee, nail-painted, jewelry-wearing, 30”-side-braided slip of a girly boy would be anything but TERRIFIED and DISGUSTED by American conservatives?
Like the bullies I grew up with, the worst parts of our culture have been empowered and elevated in the last few years. Add to this the similarities of their political leader with the painted clown at the heart of IT, and I couldn’t help but think about patriotism as an inspiration for my cake.
Looking GORGEOUS… and nothing like my sketch.
Well I don’t know how to do most of this… and it showed.
Rather than do a simple red, white, and blue cake, I thought I’d try something much MUCH more difficult to achieve.
It… largely didn’t work!
A Cake in Flux
The Wetness
I followed a recipe from The Perfect Cake for the bulk of this recipe, but opted for a strawberry syrup on the layers with an additional blueberry compote.
The layers didn’t rise very well (I question the volume in the recipe since it says the recipe can be either two 9” layers or three 8” layers… and that’s not exactly how math works). Once the poke syrup was added it threw the ratio of sponge to liquid firmly into the soggy realm.
Now that isn’t the worst thing since the poke syrup has a lot of gelatin in it. The gelatin firmed when cooled, which made the end result a very moist, almost jello salad texture. It’s not bad… but if I made it again I’d increase the recipe by 50% to get nice, thick cake layers with occasional pockets of gelatin.
Tarantula lashes.
The Isomalt
I’ve only ever seen isomalt on TV, but I thought “why not?”
Turns out… it’s both much much easier than I thought and much more temperental.
It heated and poured incredibly well, and my plan to make bloody balloons dripping with blood worked great… until I tried to remove said balloons. The isomalt stuck to the balloons and collapsed quite spectacularly. I don’t know if I needed a thicker layer of isomalt or to treat the balloons ahead of time, but despite their hilarious failure, I’m excited to try it again.
The failed experiment made for some spectacularly goopy eyelashes, too, which is something I’ve been struggling with for a while. Isomalt may be the answer…
Video Vixen
Is there anything I love to do more than try a new baking technique in front of a camera?
This is actually not a joke!
It is incredibly freeing to try something new while a recording device is turned on you. When you put a lot of effort into drafting, planning, and trying something that fails in the kitchen, it can be really devastating: see any episode of The Great British Baking Show to see this in real time. Failing in the kitchen is as much about shattered expectations as it is about shattered sugar work.
That being said… something magical happens when the camera is on me and something fails. It’s like the camera is a reminder that this is all a lark. It’s all a learning experiment.
Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are full of jaw-dropping precision and technical excellence. It’s easy to watch things online and lament over things not working out, but as I’ve said many times before, it’s all about learning.
It was really hard to turn the camera back on after such a long absence, but I’m so glad I did.
Recipes and Sources
Hmmmm…. I’m going to list the things I did below, but most importantly, take this as an opportunity to make a BETTER cake than I did.
PATRIOTIC POKE CAKE
Make three vanilla cake layers.
I made The Perfect Cake’s white sponge, but I’d recommend increasing the batter by 50% to get thicker layers or choosing your favorite dense white sponge.
While the vanilla cake is baking, prepare your poke sauce.
This can really be any strained fruit sauce, but I was happy with The Perfect Cake’s recommendation.
Boil approximately 18 oz. of fruit with a little bit of sugar until the liquid has been released but do not let the sauce thicken too much (really only 5-6 minutes on medium).
Strain this boiling syrup to remove solids and whisk with half a bag of a fruit Jell-o mix. You could also use plain gelatin, but the fruit won’t have given much flavor with the quick mix.
Set this sauce aside to cool, but do not chill. You need it liquid for the next step.
Cool the cakes completely in their pans.
Skewer the tops aggressively, either by wriggling a toothpick to create a sizeable divot or using a thicker skewer.
Drizzle the poke sauce across the three layers. Don’t feel like you need to use all the sauce.
Put the cake pans in fridge for at least three hours for the gelatin to set. Cover the cake pans with cling wrap or anything air tight to help them from drying out.
Make a blueberry coulis/compote by boiling 10 oz. of blueberries, about 1/4 cup of sugar, and a little lemon juice over medium heat just until a spatula leaves a trail in the bottom of your saucepan. Cover with cling wrap and put in fridge to cool completely.
Make a frosting of your choice!
I chose Zoë Bakes Ultra Rich Buttercream. It’s VERY creamy and not too sweet.
Prepare decorations.
I melted about a cup of isomalt over medium heat until it got to 340 degrees.
Don’t stir while heating this! You can swirl the mixture as it starts to liquefy, but it really takes care of itself.
Since there is no liquid in isomalt it gets very hot very fast.
Color and flavor the isomalt after it has reached temperature. This will cause a lot of bubbling and anger from the isomalt so be careful. This will not only burn you but scar you if it gets on your bare skin.
I poured the isomalt over three balloons filled to different amounts with water. The water absorbs the heat from the isomalt preventing the balloon from popping.
Let the isomalt cool completely (I didn’t) and then deflate balloons by draining water away from the decoration (also didn’t). This should produce a fragile burst of blood drippings (mine did only in parts).
Stack and frost the cake, placing your blueberry coulis between the layers dammed with frosting.
Because my frosting was very yellow, I gave my cake a clown white pancake powder finish by pouring powdered sugar along the base and dragging it up the sides with an offset spatula. It gave the entire cake a clown’s-face-at-the-end-of-a-fifteen-hour-shift effect that was just perfect. I accompanied this battered makeup with white chocolate eyes and bloody isomalt lashes.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Unhinge your jaw.
Consume.
Leave one shoe floating in a puddle or calling card of your choice.
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Join me next time as I resume my crawl through Terrific Cakes with the movie that brought be back to horror movies after I swore them off during the torture porn aughts: It Follows.
The birth of our new golden age of horror.
WATCH. THIS. MOVIE.
