Terrific Cakes: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Barbra?
Night of the LIving Dead (1968)
I don’t remember the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead, but it was well into adulthood.
Watching it again, I was blown away at just how UNSUBTLE this movie is: the older white guy, Harry Cooper, is TERRIBLE. He’s bossy, acts cowardly, makes the wrong decisions over and over, and gets violent when people resist him. From the moment he comes out of the basement you can’t help but egg on his inevitable end.
The late Helen Cooper is a little better, but quickly acquiesces to Harry’s will.
Tom and Judy, two young kids whose corpses will be identifiable by their charred denim get-ups, although seeming to mean well, die in such an incredibly avoidable blunder that’s it’s hard not to look at it as a character choice.
The famous Barbra spends the entire movie in absolute terror and shell-shock after she’s attacked in the graveyard. It’s probably the most accurate response to someone who finds themselves in a horror movie, but it’'s not going to win much sympathy from an audience.
And then there’s the sheriff and his posse. If the script suggested ghouls were the source of our fear, those shambling wretches inching ever closer to our bucolic domiciles, my anachronistic eyes really only went wide whenever I saw the gun-toting sheriff and his all-white brigade of vigilantes. This group of good ole boys marching through the countryside shooting ghouls on site and burning their corpses fills me with an anxiety that is both tangible and confused.
Would a younger Andy have seen this and routed for the posse? Cheering on the humans?
Would I, at any age, have seen this assemblage of gun-toting white men and not been immediately fearful?W
Would I have trusted them to do right by the rules of this film? For their community?
I grew up in a small town in Minnesota that had, I kid you not, confederate flags hanging in homes and flying from the backs of trucks. These racists (and if you are flying a confederate flag in MINNESOTA, the state farthest north in the contiguous USA, you are 100% doing it for intimidation and racism) were the same ones that regularly called me faggot and shoved me into lockers, so I’m going to believe that even a middle-school Andy would have seen the sheriff and his men for the true terror they represented.
The only character the audience can route for is the self-assured, fast-acting Ben. Romero insists the casting of Duane Jones as Ben was color-blind. Artists don’t always understand how poignant the art they make is until its out in the world; artists can’t see how their subconscious gives more of their truth to the audience than they intended. So we’ll just call it serendipity how perfectly the subtleties of Night of the Living Dead map onto 1968 America.
A Suprising, Brief Affair with the Undead
The first real zombie movie I can remember is Resident Evil from 2002 (and yes, I know the “z” word is never said in Night of the Living Dead, but ghoul feels like a euphemism for a racist slur, so I’m going back to zed). In 2003 I watched and LOVED 28 Days Later, but both of these movie were just as much stories about contagion and rage. It wasn’t until Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and the shockingly earnest World War Z by Max Brooks (the book, NOT the movie… NEVER the movie) that I really payed any attention to our shambling foes.
But there must have been a zombie before then? Billy doesn’t count!
I definitely knew zombies from my time playing JRPG’s as a kid (:45), but it wasn’t until the rest of the world welcomed them into the zeitgeist in our post-9/11 world that I paid any attention to them. It was about 2005 that I went back and watched the classics… I think?
Like most horror, the best zombie movies are a lens about their modern times. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not read the character Ben as representing more than just the sum of his actions. He’s the hero that holds together this house, if only just for a night. The white cast falls off one-by-one, almost always from their own folly. When the all-white gun-toting vigilantes kill our black hero, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they knew he was a zombie, whether or not they saw the color of his skin. His heroic journey is snuffed out at the hands of the posse of good ‘ole boys in another example of American exceptionalism.
Romero may not have made a conscious decision about race when casting Jones, but his editing leaves little to interpretation. Watching Jones body be dragged away is the hardest and most terrifying thing to watch in the entire movie. Ben did everything right. He survived the night. He tried to help others.
But it didn’t matter that he did all the right things. At the end of the day, he was just another body in the horde, so the sheriff’s men took him out.
Black-and-White (cookie) Cake
Taking a cue in subtlety from Mr. Romero, I went with my first thought for this cake: black-and-white.
Well, my first thought was a black-and-white cookie (look to the cookie…), but I wondered how I was going to translate that into a cake. How could I achieve the soft, pillowy cake of the ubiquitous NYC cookie in a layer cake? The cookie itself is very cake-like, but the icing has a distinctive texture all its own: solid on top but still creamy beneath. My first thought of making a yellow cake with chocolate and vanilla frosting wasn’t good enough. I needed that just-set icing miracle of the black-and-white.
I read through quite a few black-and-white cookie recipes as well as a few chocolate and vanilla cake recipes before coming up with my concoction: pillowy yellow cake sandwiched with chocolate pastry cream, frosted with a thin layer of whipped frosting, and iced with classic black-and-white icing.
It was a wild bet, but….
Holy hells did it pay off.
This cake was truly incredible. If a bakery served this near me I would order it for my birthday. It was that good.
Not that mistakes weren’t made along the way…
Barbecue Brainzzzzzz?
Too Brain to Fail
In addition to the black-and-white (visuals and themes) of Night of the Living Dead, the other thing I thought any Romero cake would need is brainzzz.
I found a large mold for brainzzz on Amazon, but I think my eyes were a little too big for my hungry, hungry mouth. I’ve got a surefire gelatin recipe that holds its shape, is opaque, and can have any flavor added to it (recipe below). But no one actually wants to eat this much gelatin.
I did it for the ‘gram.
The cake-karma gods came for me when this brain ended up looking like I covered it in barbeque sauce (actually raspberry ganache). I also failed to secure it with toothpicks so the heavy brainzzz slipped right off. I’m honestly lucky it didn’t hit the floor and explode when I moved the plate.
Lesson for the future: secure any brains before traveling with your cake.
Secondary lesson: don’t just do things for the picture, actually make them desirable to eat.
Brainzzz Ganache
In addition to the brainzzz, I knew I wanted a gory drip down the sides of this cake. Raspberry ganache was to be the perfect addition to the vanilla and chocolate goodness of the cake.
Flavor wise: it was. Aesthetically: it was a Fourth of July kind of vibe.
Attempting to color the raspberry ganache took this delicious, fruity accompaniment from gory to grilly. Pictures give much more grace to this color, which, really, truly, honestly, unappetizingly, looked like barbeque sauce.
Still! There was a time when I couldn’t make a ganache to save the lives of my loved ones in the face of a teeming horde of zombies, and now, although discolored, my family gets to enjoy flavorable, fruit-flavored chocolate drips.
The arc of progress.
Video Killed No Radio Stars Tonight
And now it’s time to talk about the 220lb. ghoul in the room: video.
In addition to this incredibly delicious cake, I made a video to serve as partial guide to making and constructing this cake, and complete instruction booklet to my absurdity.
I’ve never done anything like this, for no good reasons other than feeling like I couldn’t produce the quality I’d be happy with. Oh, and the threat of intense humiliation. I’ve talked about this before, but trying to do something new as an adult is its own kind of TERROR. It’s hard to do something you’ve never done before, and especially hard to put that out in the world.
But that’s how we learn, right? If the things I learned doing Montclair Pride had been things I was expected to know going in, I never would have offered my name as volunteer. I taught myself Adobe Illustrator! And HTML! And merchandise design! And Facebook events! That last one isn’t as impressive, I know, but it was surprisingly annoying.
So why not learn video editing in the harsh light of the internet? Adobe Premiere Pro is scary even to graphic designers, so let’s JUST DO IT!
Therefore, if challenging myself with new baking skills wasn’t difficult enough, I’m now adding video editing to the mix. This first video took me a lot longer than it probably looks like it did, but I learned a LOT about the process. A lot of those lessons involved the acoustics of my kitchen, but also that my hair might be gorgeous.
Do the people know?
The Ghouls Were the Friends We Made Along the Way
Night of the Living Dead is an easy recommendation, even to the horror averse. If you can make it through the extreme close-ups of me eating raspberry jello, you can make it through this movie.
It’s a great film to watch from the perspective of social commentary but also incredible to watch as something that birthed an entire mythos.
Black-and-White Cake with Raspberry Ganache and Dark Chocolate Pastry Cream
This cake was ultimately a delight. It lasted longer than any of the characters in the film that inspired it, and was delicious enough to keep me on this first step of my 25-foot journey.
I’d skip the brainzzz and keep the ganache its natural reddish color: don’t try to get fancy with a more realistic gore. You’ll shoot for blood and end up with scabby barbecue sauce.
Of course, if you wanted to keep this cake as just a cake (ugh, bring a book….) then you can call it “done” after the icing stage, which is NOT to be missed, no matter how scary it might seem. A little bit of parchment paper and ample chilling time made icing a lot easier than I thought it would be. If I made this cake again (when…) I’ll likely go even wilder with icing so that each slice gets some chocolate and some vanilla.
Recipes and Sources
Cake: Yellow Cake Layers from Zoë Bakes Cakes
White Chocolate Whipped Cream Frosting: Baking: From My Home to Yours
Dark Chocolate Pastry Cream: Professional Baking
Raspberry Ganache: Professional Baking
Corpse Eyes and Brainz:
Mix 3/4 cup HOT water and 1/3 cup sugar
Stir until sugar is dissolved
Mix in 1/4 cup heavy cream and stir well
In a separate container, mix 1 cup cold water and 2.5 tbsp gelatin
Let gelatin bloom for a few minutes (until it’s fully saturated)
Mix two mixtures together and stir until gelatin dissolves (you may need to microwave the gelatin for a few seconds)
Add food coloring and flavor as desired
Pour into containers
For items like eyes, pour in one color and let chill in the fridge for a few minutes before adding in the next color
The longer you wait between layers, the more differentiation between the colors. I wanted my eyes SUPER corpsey, so I only let the black gelatin chill in the fridge for three minute before flooding it with white for a delicious cataracts-effect
Refridgerate for 30 minutes (eyes) to several hours (brainz) = gelatin should be firm
To free gelatin from its mold, it can help to place the mold in a warm water bath for 15-30 seconds
Thanks for your eyes! Follow and share with me on Instagram, Facebook, and (now) Youtube!
Join me next week for Scream… which is so much better than its trailer would suggest.*
*The AUDACITY of how much Drew Barrymore is in this trailer. Claps. Claps. Claps.
