Nightmare Factory: Use It or Lose Your Mind

whorls of viscera as far as the eye can see

I’m prone to nightmares.

In this instance, “prone” could be defined as “running a nightly marathon of slasher flicks every time I fall asleep.” This is only slightly hyperbolic. Sometimes the terror is more existential. Sometimes its full of action. Of late, my nightmares have been the worst kind: rote humiliations like not studying for a test or being back at my old job. The banality of these nightmares is the scariest. After all, nightmares aren’t subtle. They’re about survival. Fight or flight. Use it or lose it. Banal dreams are the cruelest because they remind us it’s not really about fighting for our lives. Most of living is just about wading through another humiliating confrontation with adulthood.

I don’t remember when my nightmares started, but one of my earliest memories is waking up in my childhood bed scared to open my eyes. In the dream, an ice cream truck had opened fire on a crowd of people, my family included, while I stood a small distance away. I coudn’t have been more than five or six. I remember laying in bed, my eyes squeezed shut. Opening my eyes meant confronting the reality that my entire family was dead. I was convinced that my nightmare was a memory. I laid like that until my dad got up for work. Lucky for me, he was on the days rotation and got up for work around 3:45AM. I have this experience at least once a week: laying in bed trying to reconcile my nightmares with reality. Lucky for me, my husband gets up early, too.

Over a decade later, when I read Stephen King’s The Regulators I was both horrified and delighted to see my childhood fears rendered in King’s humanistic detail. King’s homicidal vehicles weren’t ice cream trucks, but he perfectly captured the horrror of the bucolic made macabre. As I started King’s book, his foreshadowing was like reliving my childhood nightmare. By the time the shooting started I felt relief. I felt like I had seen the future, like King and I had shared something. Like we knew each other. Could see each other.

I don’t bemoan my nightmares. I try to embrace them.

Not to get too middle-school goth here, but there’s a lot of comfort in the rhythm of sleep, terror, and relief that a night of screaming brings. There’s a bounty of creativity and ideas hidden behind a veneer of paralyzing fear. If dreams are our minds reorganizing the stimuli of the day, nightmares, for me, are the magnified essence of life’s connective threads. Horror forces me to focus my thoughts into a single trembling point. When it’s good, I wake up on a runner’s high after a night of fleeing. My ideas and ambition are at a peak. There’s nothing like surviving another night to make you seize the day.

I can see into your wet soul, and it wants more frosting.

Cool. Cool thoughts about your night terrors, Andy, but what does that have to do with the wet, wet corpse you’ve presented here?

SO MUCH!

This cake is gross looking.

Like, cute eyes, but G-R-O-S-S in person. It’s wet and slimy and although its frosting is the pinkish grey of a healthy brain its raspberry blood fully turned it into an 8” x 10” mound of intestines.

And yet… I laughed and laughed when I finished painting this gorey tableau. I clutched my stomach and guffawed until I cried at how grotesque and adorable this cake was. A real kawaii/kowaii moment.

With Halloween fast approaching, I knew I wanted to make a grotesque cake. The only problem was that my husband’s family was visiting. They’re lovely people with normal interests and good hearts. In other words: they’re not a spooky family. They’re not the kind of family that shows you Jaws and The Thing when you’re eleven. The kind of family that gets in a fight at the dinner table over Mimic vs. The Relic. (I’m linking The Relic because I will not participate in Penelope Ann Miller erasure.) Unlike my husband, I come from a spooky family. I saw all the Hellraisers before eighth grade. I grew up on Return to Oz. I wear a locket with Ellen Ripley’s picture in it.

But I made them this cake, anyways.

I piled a glistening mound of intestines atop four pounds of sugar, butter, cocoa, oil, flour, sugar, vanilla and red food coloring. I made these sweet people a mountain of moist goo to dig their forks into.

And you know what? They laughed. They loved. They devoured entrails alongside their spooky son-in-law.

Because it’s fun to laugh at the monsters. It’s a hoot to embrace the twisted parts of our psyche, even if a lot of us only do it on Halloween. The eyes add a lot of levity to the cake, but I cannot stress enough just how wet this cake looks in person. I don’t think my in-laws would buy this out of a shop window, but with me as their nightmare tour guide, we enjoyed a moist slice of Red Velvet Viscera.

There’s not much to say about the baking of this cake. It’s the Red Velvet recipe from America’s Test Kitchen’s great cookbook The Perfect Cake. The book is spectacular. It’s both informative and interesting. The recipes go into great detail about why these recipes “work” and the introduction is great for trouble-shooting problems. I beg to ask, though, that even if your four pounds of sugar, butter, and flour turn into a hockey puck, how much trouble are you really in? Toast your failure like an Eggo and add more frosting. Life hack.

The only tip I’d give for this cake is to let yourself go easy on the food coloring. The recipe calls for TWO TABLESPOONS of red food coloring. I know we all want our Red Velvet to bleed into our souls, but this cake has maybe a teaspoon of food coloring in it and it’s still red enough to get the job done. I did replace the food coloring's liquid volume with water to no ill effect. I suggest aiming for a scab red over a Carrie White red.

The intestines are cream cheese frosting from The Perfect Cake with thinned Raspberry Jam (heat a half cup of jam with three tablespoons of water until smooth). When I ultimately cover another cake with viscera, I’ll use a Swiss Buttercream so the shape holds a little better.

Or will I?

There’s something so delicously gross about the whorls losing their shape, liquefying on the counter.

The eyes are modeling chocolate and gel food dye. The extreme close-ups are another in a long line of examples of my fudge-fingeredness. At some point in adulthood I forgot how to color inside the lines.