Terrific Cakes: Jennifer’s Devil’s Food

Jennifer’s Body (2009)

You may not remember this movie.

If you remember it, you probably remember it as Diablo Cody’s critically panned follow-up to Juno and the downfall of Tranformers’ Megan Fox: a fall from grace for two previously praised women in Hollywood. When I first saw the trailer for Jennifer’s Body, I’m sure I was torn between wanting to see it and wanting to hate Megan Fox. It was 2009, the era of Perez Hilton and a mere two years after Britney’s infamous head shaving. America was hungry for its “girls behaving badly” tropes and we eagerly stood by with pitchforks.

Looking at the trailer for Jennifer’s Body, you can’t ignore the male gaze of its editor, which is funny since the movie was written and directed by women. It’s in the vein of that “I Kissed a Girl” nonsense (Katy Perry’s song came out in 2008). Basically this looks like a bad horror movie full of lazy exploitation and cliches.

And yet…

“You’re killing people.”

“No, I’m killing boys.”

And yet…

“I will finish you if I have to.”

“Okay… you can barely finish gym class.”

There are enough whiffs of Heathers, Death Becomes Her, and Jawbreakerin the trailer that even 2009 Andy couldn’t believe Diablo Cody would have written something so queer-baitingly one-dimensional. The longer story of this terrible trailer is one of studio executives, focus groups, and misunderstanding, but it can be summarized in the note from marketing Diablo Cody received about this movie’s value: “Megan Fox hot.”

So despite this trailer designed to turn me away from the movie, despite the itch of society telling me to hate Megan Fox and delight in her fall from success, I watched Jennifer’s Body soon after it came out (probably when it came to me on a Netflix DVD?), LOVED it, and promptly forgot about it. No one was talking about it. It came out, was torn apart, drove the women involved in it out of Hollywood for a while, and the cultural discourse moved on to its next sacrifice.

Since then it’s become a certified hit amongst the horror community and the darling of queer audiences… or at least those that have revisited it. It’s worth a revisit. It’s honestly worth a revisit even if you haven’t seen it. None of us should underestimate how much the lens of our perceptions have changed in the last thirteen years. We’ve been through a LOT as a society.

Jennifer Check is the Hero We Deserve

At the heart of Jennifer’s Body is Megan Fox.

She glows on camera. She’s funny, stupid, alive, mean, manipulative, charming, sweet, tortured. Jennifer Check (the aforementioned body) is all of these and more. She feels like a real person. Like the women of Scream, Jennifer Check feels like someone we knew, or at least someone we wanted to know, in high school. It’s not just that Megan Fox is beautiful, and make no mistake about it, she is unbelievable to look at, but she exudes a gravitational force that pulls all eyes to her.

Her relationship with Needy (Amanda Seyfried) could be read as one-sided or purely manipulative, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like Jennifer’s aware of her strengths and weaknesses and keeps someone close that sees her as a person, and not just an idol.

Not that Jennifer Check is a rocket scientist. I didn’t accidentally use the word “stupid” in the list above. Jennifer puts just enough effort into things to get what she wants, all while delivering often cringe-worthy lines from the school of late 2000’s humor. This movie has the brand of humor that would get meaner and meaner until its final evolution as edgelord. It’s in the same joke-dense, rapid-fire, punching-up-punching-down style of “30 Rock,” and it’s a reminder that this humor can be both hilarious and terrible. This style was really informed by its time: a fantasia where we thought racism, sexism, and homophobia were in their death throes, and therefore could be mocked and laughed at. Some people say we thought we were in a post-racial or post-sexist society. Uh… no. Never thought that. Never felt safe.

But I did think the people who would kill me as soon as sell me a wedding cake were dying off. I thought their children would be better.

Oh, how wrong we all were. It’s difficult to explain to someone who wasn’t an adult at that time, but the reason that humor was funny was because it was all said with a winking absurdity: no one could possibly be as evil and mean as these things they were saying implies. Turns out… we weren’t even scratching the surface of how hateful people are.

But in 2009 this humor was provocative and most of us laughed at it. Jennifer’s a product of her time that’s mature enough to understand social currency (looks, humor, negging), but still too young to understand the long term consequences of her actions.

It’s hard not to route for her. For one, she’s murdered at the hands of an emo band. For two, in this gray town of Chris Pratt’s, she shimmers like a beacon.

Okay, so she’s killing people. I hear you on that.

People that don’t deserve it.

A lost, scared foreign exchange student. A grieving football player. A nervous emo guy. Her best friend’s boyfriend.

But…

I just want Jennifer to live. I want someone to introduce her to some great existentialist literature and for her to stop dumbing herself down, lowering herself to the level of the people her town surrounds her with, and just GET THE FUCK OUT. I want her to see how strong and capable she is and move away. Go to Santa Fe, Megan. Open up a crystal store, make some desert-witch friends, and just live your eternal life. Maybe get an undercut. Start wearing lots of skulls. I think Jennifer was a Bell Jar away from getting the fuck out of Devil’s Kettle, with or without demonic powers.

I don’t know what the message of Jennifer’s Body will be for you when you watch it, but for me, it feels like a cautionary tale about letting yourself settle. When Jennifer’s human, she has everyone wrapped around her finger, or at least everyone she wants wrapped around it. When she’s tranformed, it’s really just an exagerration of her attractions. It’s not like she transformed into someone more desirable. It’s not like the ritual made people flock to her. If anything, she changed from nymph to siren.

I’m so sad when Jennifer is killed near the end of the movie, but I worry that Jennifer Check would have stayed in Devil’s Kettle one way or another. The shark in this little pond might have been happy just taking what she wanted with little resistance. She would have let the honeypot of her worship consume her, belittle her, and atrophy any hope for growing into the true hellspawn she should have been.

Am I basically just pitching a sequel: Jennifer’s Body 2: Jennifer Takes Manhattan? I’d watch it. I’d get the crop top.

Justice for Jennifer’s Body, indeed.

Jennifer’s Devil’s Food

Pictures really can’t capture the glory that was this cake. The video does a much better job, but even then, it had to be seen to be believed.

I’m a fan of the obvious, so when the idea of making a devil’s food cake came to me, I just couldn’t turn away from the simplicity of the idea. Jennifer’s a devil. She eats people. Done.

The other obvious element I knew I needed in this cake was an homage to Jennifer’s lips, which are constantly under the lens of Karyn Kusama’s gaze. I went back and forth a lot about how to do the lips and what to do with the lips, though. I literally woke up at 4AM the day I was set to make this cake in a panic and redrew my entire plan.

My original plan was to do a Baked Alaska tongue as a layer in the cake. I would sandwich the ice cream between layers of Devil’s Food sponge and set the whole thing ablaze with fire. I was nervous about the tongue breaking off as well as the cake being too hard to cut. The disparity between the ice cream and cake would have made it unpleasant to eat (I know from the experience of a particularly disastrous ice cream cake I made a few years ago. Truly epic failure.).

So my brain woke me up, I lit my Cinderose candle and I drew what would ultimately become one of the most absurd cakes I’ve ever made… or seen.

I abandoned my idea of a traditional layer cake and embraced the jigsaw puzzling of a carved cake in the shape of oversized, exagerrated lips. Although the execution of the finish may have been done in classic “Fudge-Fingered” style, the results for the shapes and impact cannot be denied:

Wet, Wet Lips

Bonnie Bell Dr. Pepper Lip Gloss Fantasia

Now, I’m not one to finish things very nicely, so from the jump, I was pretty sure this would be a disaster.

My original plan was just to cover the cake with buttercream, and smooth it out as much as possible. I also thought about (and literally drove to Michael’s and sat in the parking lot debating with myself) buying fondant, coloring it with metallic shine and using that as the lips.

It wasn’t until the cake was carved, frosted, and chilled that I decided to pour a mirror glaze over the cake. As you can see from the above image, it wasn’t terribly thick, and it highlighted all of the imperfections of the cake, but OH. WAS. IT. GLOSSY.

The shine on this thing.

The beacon of light this cake cast in our kitchen for five days. It was truly something to behold.

And What Happened to the Tongue?

When my original idea to use ice cream as the curved tongue fell apart, I decided I would use the remaining cake scraps from my carving to form a cake-pop tongue.

So with cake scraps and the remnants of my frosting in hand, I jammed them together without looking at the proper ratios of cake pops and made a soggy, mishapen monstrosity. Here’s a tip: much less frosting to cake is needed for your cake pop. You want it just wet enough to hold together.

Luckily, because I was freezing my cake (buttercream cakes need to be frozen before a mirror glaze can be applied), I was able to wrap my cake pop in plastic wrap, place it on Jennifer’s lips, and let physics freeze it in place.

Oh? That’s not what you were asking about?

You were wondering why the tongue looks so charred and drippy?

Well….. despite the cake, carving, and mirror glaze literally keeping me up at night in anxiety, the piece that I absolutely failed at making was the simple meringue I used to cover the cake-pop tongue. Making meringue is not difficult, but it’s very easy to mess up. I cavalierly approached this, knowing it was the part of the bake I’d done the most… only to add the sugar WAY too early and thereby prevent the meringue from ever achieving stiff peaks. Basically I rolled the tongue in meringue soup, which promptly melted when I poured flaming kirsch onto it.

Carving a Cake

In a pleasant turn of events, one of the easiest parts of this cake was carving it!

I made two 9” square cakes and one 8” square cake as bases, and with a little bit of finagling (check out the YouTube video to see how I did this), I made a pair of lips! The buttercream was Kim-Joy’s Italian Buttercream, which takes a LONG time to make (her recipe says it should beat for 30 minutes, but every time I’ve made it I have to do this AND put it in the freezer for 20 minutes before beating it a final time), but is delicious and super strong.

I figured the important part of carving a cake was getting the layers cold, especially since chocolate cakes are notoriously crumby, and this instinct paid off. It was nice to have something go well… a Shyamalan-level twist in this complex bake.

I will definitely be carving more cake in the future.

Video Vixen

Thank you to everyone who keeps watching my forays into Youtube, and especially thanks to everyone who subscribed and shared. I’m surprised how much I’m liking making these videos, but with the editing, baking, and writing… I may need to do these once every two weeks.

As you can imagine… things are getting weirder. I should have expected as much. I use cakes and baking to confront and befriend my demons, so it only makes sense that turning a camera on this process would expose things I wasn’t aware of.

And getting into little costumes and covering myself with gore makes me giggle.

Recipes and Sources

Cake: Adapted from Professional Baking (use butter, add 1TBSP cayenne… seriously… it’s a LOT of cake)

Frosting: Italian Buttercream from Baking with Kim-Joy.

Mirror Glaze: I used one from Wilton, but there are a million recipes out there, all of which use slightly different ingredients. I recommend googling and finding one that most closely matches your pantry! The crucial thing to do is to pour it on a frozen (completely, like eight hours frozen) buttercream cake and to make sure the glaze is the exact right temperature when pouring. It’s science!

Eyes: Modeling chocolate, fondant, and tooth picks

Thanks for your eyes! Follow and share on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube!

Join me next week for The Stepford Wives (1975)… which messes me up everytime I watch it. It might be one of my top five most TERRIFYING movies. The betrayal. The single step to the left it is from reality. It’s so scary because it’s an exagerration of our society, not a total fiction.

For whatever reason, I could only find this movie free on Youtube… If you really feel inspired, the book is GREAT and very short, too.

#TeamBobbie #TeamCharmaine #TeamJoanna