Terrific Cakes: Bubble Butt Boyfriend White Peach and Banana Bundt
Scream (1996)
Scream came out at a perfect time for me to be entranced.
In 1996 I was in sixth grade and obsessed with three movies: Death Becomes Her, Grease 2, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. These three movies clicked with me in a way that is hard to describe. I think most people have a movie that resonates on a level they don’t fully understand. A movie that becomes an obsession because it feels like more than the sum of its parts. For some people their “click” movie is Practical Magic, for others it’s The Notebook, and for legions of hetero cis men it's The Shawshank Redemption.
These resonant movies show us something about ourselves we didn’t even know was there. While watching them, it feels like a part of us is being seen, maybe for the first time.
Sometimes that’s invigorating: the first time I heard Helen Sharp breathlessly exclaim “Madeline! I’ve got to speak to Madeline at once!” a little part of my brain turned on. When Madeline Ashton sang and danced in her disco broadway review, I was basically Dr. Ernest Menville (3:45 here) in the audience, clapping and cheering enthusiastically as my family looked on, somewhat confused by my outsized reaction.
Sometimes being seen is terrifying: when Michael and Stephanie embraced at the end of Grease 2 (2:15 for the moment that will burn out your VHS), all I could think about was kissing Michael.
I worshipped Stephanie. I danced along with her. I flipped my collar up, even when I didn’t wear them. I pushed my hair back behind my ears, even when it was cut short. I pouted into mirrors. But I don’t think anyone thought this obsession was my wanting to be with Michelle Pfeiffer. I wanted to BE Stephanie Zinone. I wanted to be with Michael.
As a little gay kid, that’s TERRIFYING. It’s a horrible realization (or it was in the 90’s) when it clicks that your staring at the boy in the romantic scenes isn’t comparison, or curiosity. You sit in terror watching a movie with your family praying they don’t see what you just saw… or that they’re at least nice enough to ignore it.
I started being called a “faggot” in fourth grade, so by sixth grade, I was aware of what these feelings probably meant. There was something in me the other kids saw, years before something south of my navel caught up with my brain’s fixation on Grease 2.
More movies would expose me sooner than later, and with each one I was more terrified of people realizing why I loved them so much. It wasn’t hard to see the connecting thread of my obsession.
So in 1996, when my parents came back from a date night where they’d watched Scream, telling my sisters and I that we would love it, but that we were too young, I was primed.
When I saw that commercial with Drew Barrymore (who I already loved from Firestarter) and Gale Weathers in that painfully neon green suit… I “clicked” with the trailer.
A few months later, my parents rented Scream for my older sisters. They watched it in the living room and I was supposed to stay in my room. What actually happened was that I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, leaning out into the hall and staring enraptured at Sidney, Gale, and Tatum. I was enchanted.
Scream probably wasn’t the first horror movie that resonated with me on the terror/queer frequency. It had to be Ripley.
But Scream was maybe the first horror movie where I really cared for the victims. I was old enough to connect with the victims as peers. The script is fleshed out enough to treat these characters as people. I remember crying when Tatum died. I cried on this rewatching when Tatum died.
Wes Craven was the king of creating genres. I know this is well trod analysis, but it bares repeating that not only did he help create the slasher genre with Nightmare on Elm Street and the concept of the “final girl,” but that he was able to step outside his own success/failures and comment so intelligently on them, propelling the genre of meta-horror into box office gold (and eventual destruction) with Scream, is frankly astonishing. Okay, technically he tried it first with Freddy’s New Nightmare, which is better than you remember (if you remember it at all), but it really clicked with Scream.
And he didn’t do it just by surprising the audience. He didn’t do it by just adding twists and red herrings. He did it by infusing his horror movie with characters that KNOW HORROR MOVIES EXIST.
Seriously. Watch an old horror movie and keep track of how long it takes for people to realize they’re in peril. The original Halloween is tragic because so many of its victims (also well drawn, interesting women) have absolute no chance of survival. The only cast member that even realizes any murders have taken place is Laurie Strode. Halloween’s final girl is the only one who gets a head start. No wonder she’s the only survivor.
But Scream.
Oof.
Scream infuses the women it kills with humor, passion, life, intelligence, and vices. Drew Barrymore is so optimistic and happy at the beginning of the movie. She’s polite, but stands up for herself when pushed. She grabs a weapon. She hides. She runs. She does what audiences were screaming at final girls to do for years, but she still dies. She’s still overpowered. We watch the same thing happen with Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott only a few minutes later. Right after bemoaning whining big-breasted horror movie girls “running up the stairs when they should be running for the door,” Neve Campbell is screaming and running up her stairs in absolute terror.
Because as much as we’d like to pretend we know what we’d do in this moment: we don’t. In a real moment of fight or flight, we’d all make stupid mistakes. We’d all probably die. This genius juxtaposition is what makes Scream so powerful. It reminds us how powerless we really are at the hands of someone intent on hurting us.
And it’s Queer How…?
That’s how.
Tatum (also Gale, also Cheerleader in Bathroom, also Sidney, also Laura Ashley).
Rose McGowan three years before I’d become ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED WITH HER in Jawbreaker.
Tatum is full of life. She’s funny. Quick. Smart. She stands up for Sidney and is the emotional core of their friend group.
I would have loved to see what Tatum grew up to be. I would love an alternate timeline where Tatum is Sylvie in Emily in Paris. She’s sexual and flirtatious, but not in a way that feels judgmental, aggressive or damning. She feels like a fully realized girl eager for the rest of her life, but having fun in the moment. In the few scenes she’s in, Rose McGowan fills Tatum with so much vigor that when she meets her end, it’s truly horrifying.
This kind of character is what makes good slasher films, well, good. We have to care about who’s getting killed or their isn’t any horror. When a sequel makes the killer the star (pretty much every Nightmare, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Hellraiser after the originals), it takes the fear away. I can’t be rooting for Freddy to kill in ever more elaborate ways. I have to root for people to survive. (Notable exception: when the “monster” has been given enough back story and character to be the actual victim, think Frankenstein’s monster or Jennifer Check.)
Tatum is given the most absurd death in this movie. Truly it’s a scene that cannot be forgotten for its absurdity and… logisitical problems? But I still cry when she dies. I still care when Tatum’s flaming light is snuffed out. I want her to live. I want her to live in a world where fighting back is possible. A world where she could be smart enough or clever enough to keep the insecure men in her life from using her how they see fit.
Because that’s another level of Scream’s real terror.
These women full of charisma, uniquneness, nerve, and talent galore are snuffed out by greasy, whiny, bored little boys. Their intelligence and awareness can’t stand up against the selfish joy these boys take in terrifying and killing them. They play their games and die. They try to hide and die. They fight back and die. It’s sad and it’s scary and it hits on a reality of our society, how pathetic men fail up and are told they deserve even more while spectacular women question themselves and settle for less.
And realizing you’re in the horror movie doesn’t save you.
Most of us don’t make it past these insecure lost boys with our careers, our families, our sense of self, or our relationships intact.
But fighting back against them is our only option, even if it won’t save most of us.
We’ve got to come out of the closet with our umbrellas set to “puncture” and tell them this isn’t going to be our reality.
And that’s queer as fuck.
Bubble Butt Boyfriends: A Cautionary Tale
In addition to crying during this movie, I also let out a frankly pornographic amount of moans from the snappy dialog of Tatum, Sidney, and Gale. Groans of disappointment were all that I had for the men (even you, Randy and Dewey).
And what to my wondering eyes should appear this viewing but a character I’ve largely ignored in the past, a harbinger known in the credits only as “Cheerleader in Bathroom.”
If Scream was the meta-horror movie that would catalyze a genre, truly no character was the herald of this theory more than CiB.
The facial expressions. The disgust. The insults. The friend in the high-waisted gap khakis and green berets?!
Iconic.
And more than anything, her line reading of the phrase “bubble butt boyfriend Billy,” when talking about Sidney’s attack just clicked. I knew it had to be a cake.
And so it was written.
Okay… so the decorations didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, but when I tell you this cake was delicious. When I tell you my husband and I kept sneaking pieces of this like we were ghouls looking for a wet brain. When I tell you this bubble butt boyfriend didn’t last nearly as long as I thought he would.
Well it all just felt so right.
Stabs at “it”
PEaches and Bananas … Wink Wink
This recipe was based largely on a recipe from Zoë Bakes Cakes for her double apple bundt cake with a honey bourbon glaze. I decided apples weren’t nearly gay enough, so I picked a few more suggestive fruits to serve as the foundation of my recipe.
In Zoe’s recipe she uses grated apples and chopped apples. Although she didn’t explicitly say it, I figured she was using the grated apples for moisture and the diced apples for body/fillings. My thought was that I could achieve a similar effect with mashed bananas (moisture) and diced peaches (body). Spoiler alert: it worked perfectly.
Peaches? In October? Groundbreaking.
Trying to find peaches in October was surprisingly difficult. It shouldn’t be surprising, but when we’ve been trained to get any produce at any time, it can be a shock when you can’t.
After visiting all of my grocery stores I was ready to give up and fake it (not sure how I would have faked a peach), but at the farmer’s market my friend Shannon (Making & Movies!) found what I thought was a fuzzy lemon.
These light-chartreuse fuzz balls are apparently Iron Mountain peaches, a late season peach grown in New Jersey. They are similar to a white peach and cook like apples, since they are still relatively firm when ripe.
They were perfect. The flavor was very light with a little bit of sweetness. It balanced out the banana and toned down the ginger.
LIke Modeling Chocolate on a Hot Tin Roof
After the intensity of my Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Barbra? Cake, I really needed an easy week of baking.
Bundt cakes are great for so many reasons, but one of the biggest is that they are just easy. Most bundt cake recipes use a single bowl and don’t even require a mixer. You basically slosh together the liquids, add the dry, fold in whatever loose bits you have, and bake for an hour(ish).
It’s just that easy!
What isn’t great about bundts is that there is precious little room for decoration.
I sketched out a simple design scheme with a feminized Ghost Face and green flower barettes in honor of CiB’s friend. The shade of green is also a nod to Gale Weathers’ iconic suit and Tatum’s top.
Things I didn’t consider:
How dark the cake would be, thereby losing any contrast with the black fondant face I cut out. I tried to give ghost face some white eyeliner as a last ditch effort to make it “pop,” but it doesn’t look great.
How desperately I wanted to eat the cake, thereby melting my barettes when I rested them on this sizzling bubble butt bundt.
Luckily, even though the cake’s decoration was a letdown, it had a beautiful stand to sit upon thanks to my friend Shannon. You can see the details of it on her blog post HERE! (If you get a kick out of my musings on cake, I can guarantee you’ll love her blog, too! I know what you’re thinking… blogs? How 1996! Theme-queen!)
Video Vixen
Thank you to everyone who watched my foray into YouTube last week, and especially thanks to anyone who subscribed.
It’s funny to do something like this, something that is literally asking for people’s attention.
It feels weird….
But I committed to this course of action, so if you’re up for it, watch, subscribe, like, and share this insanity with more people! Who knows, maybe one day there will be a cookbook, Terrific Cakes: Inspiring Bakes full of Delight and Dread. Working title. I’d sell more if it was just called Bubble Butts in the Kitchen, but I think I’d need to do more squats.
Bubble Butt Boyfriend White PEach and Banana Bundt
I don’t have much more to say about this cake: it was delicious.
I think you could substitute your own suggestive produce so long as you followed the ratios of moisturizing and bodifying (technical terms). So much of baking is understanding ratios… well… let’s call it:
chemistry > rations > flavors > size > cooking time > decoration
Something like that?
Because I used peaches and bananas, I replace the spice in Zoë’s cake with ground ginger, too. I was worried that a full TBSP of ground ginger would be too much for the recipe, but I wondered this after dumping it all in, so the only way through was forward. Turns out that with the whole wheat flour adding some nuttiness, the white peach’s subtlety, and the bananas adding a surprising amount of flavor, the ginger balanced it all out perfectly.
The final alteration I made was to replace the bourbon in Zoë’s recipe with Vana Tallin, a truly delicious spiced liqueur that my husband and I max out on whenever we (or any of our friends) head to the Baltic.
Recipes and Sources
Cake: Double Apple Bundt Cake from Zoë Bakes Cakes
Ghost Face: Fondant (Barf…. I felt lazy this week, but I should have at least made my own fondant. Actually, scratch that, I should have just made a modeling chocolate approximation of ghost face or my own chocolate mold.)
Barettes: Jordan almonds and modeling chocolate
Thanks for your eyes! Follow and share on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube!
Join me next week for Jennifer’s Body… which is legitamately great. Don’t let the trailer or the marketing for the movie fool you. This movie was attacked, Britney Spears-style when it launched. Critics delighted in tearing down Megan Fox, but this movie is, like Scream, smarter than it looks.
#TeamJennifer
