Terrific Cakes: The Descent - Dirt Nap Pudding
The Descent (2006)
Real talk: this was a hard movie to complete.
I think I first watched this movie when it came out, sometime around 2006, and loved it.
If I squint my eyes and tilt my head, I think I can still see why?
Squint My Eyes
The Descent starts out SO promising. Well… it starts very traumatically, but that’s fine for a horror movie.
We’re introduced to a group of women with complex relationships and a penchant for adventure coming together to help their friend deal with a truly tragic experience. This group of incredibly capable spelunkers enter an eerily beautiful subterranean system where things start to go wrong and the frayed edges of their shared history starts to unravel. The tension starts ramping up. A breaking point feels like it’s just on the horizon.
The movie is funny when it should be. Efficient dialogue shows us who these women are and who they are to each other. It feels like it’s really going to be great.
And then the monsters turn up. And then the women turn into Lara Croft, Alice, and Carter Burke.
It’s confusing.
And frustrating.
It feels like two completely different movies with two different casts.
It’s hard to know if this schism is an anachronistic lens that I’m looking at this movie from, but I don’t think so. Aliens manages to craft complex female characters that stay true to themselves as they’re besieged by xenomorphs. Kill Bill shows the fragility of REDACTED while setting up the arc of her superhuman revenge fantasy. Even the aforementioned Resident Evil heroine, Alice, gets enough backstory to justify her about face.
In its defense, The Descent does this a little bit. From the opening scene there’s a hint at infidelity between one of the women (Juno) and the protagonist’s (Sarah) husband. It’s never fully confirmed, but Juno’s lingering eyes are what the movie wants to use as justification for the treachery, betrayal, and murder that we’re later asked to watch befall this group of friends.
It’s not enough for me. Maybe it was in 2006? I think we were still a few years away from Netflix throwing nearly every film with a female lead character into its “strong-female lead” genre, but this movie reeks of someone seeing a complex, tense film about grief and relationships and saying, “But Resident Evil was so successful. Can we make it more…. that?”
Ummmmm….. disagree, Netflix.
Tilt My Head
Maybe this movie didn’t sit with me, and REALLY didn’t inspire me, because it was so close to being great.
As a movie about grief and friendship, it does a great job of showing instead of telling, making you care about the characters, and setting emotional landmines for the audience to watch the characters inch ever closer to.
As an action movie, it does a decent job of keeping you guessing, fleshing its world out with well-adhered rules, and ramping up the tension with great music and strong performances.
But the movie doesn’t bring these two things together. The death of most of the characters happen in moments of panic, overreaction, or impulse. The women are all introduced as experts. They fastidiously prepare for their adventure. All of this careful character building seems to disappear when the monsters come out. It’s hard to reconcile their actions with what we’ve been shown about them so far. It feels especially gratuitous when the movie did such a great job of making us care about their relationships, only to see the characters abandon or turn on each other so quickly.
I should be talking more about the impact of the film… but I’m left confused with what I’m supposed to feel or walk away with.
I wasn’t cheering in the aisles when Juno got murdered by Sarah. A series of misunderstandings and half-confessions doesn’t justify our protagonist murdering someone she’s been close friends with for years.
I wasn’t clawing at my armrest while our lone survivor clawed her way up a mountain of bones towards a ray of light.
I was mostly angry that the end result of all the careful story telling at the beginning devolved into women in hysteria.
Dirt Nap Pudding
Uninspired by the movie, I struggled a lot with what to make for my terrific cake. A week off for Thanksgiving did nothing to help my procrastination, and there was a moment when I almost abandoned this movie entirely.
My first thought was to do an upside-down cake, but a trial cake with persimmon and apple left me cold, buried, and clawing at my throat.
I’m pretty sure my friend Shannon saved this movie when she suggested the most obvious dessert in the world for a movie about subterranean mayhem and rot: dirt pudding.
You can really tell how much I like a movie by the number of doodles I make. This is not a lot…
My well laid plans mostly worked out, but in a totally different order.
From here, it was a relatively easy exercise to put together my Dirt Nap Pudding… or it would have been if I’d just bought some of the elements.
A layered pudding, at least in my opinion, needs at least four layers of different textures:
Bulk - brownies, cake, blondies, lady fingers, etc.
Gloop - pudding, custard
Fluff - mousse, gelatin, cool whip
Crunch - graham crackers, oreo crumbles, nuts, candy
Because the most iconic image from The Descent is Sarah screaming in the pool of blood, I knew my pudding/trifle would need its own lake of strawberry sauce as well.
Trifling
Making vs. Buying
I have nothing against buying baked goods. In fact, many happy nights of my life have involved sitting down with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and Entenmann’s.
Too many nights…
Not enough nights?
Regardless, if you are planning on making your own Dirt Nap Pudding, I implore you to purchase at least one of the elements. I would argue the best thing to purchase is your “fluff” layer. As you can see in my video, the mousse is really where my trifle starts collapsing into its own briny muck.
Once the trifle is packed, there isn’t much room for your fluff layer to deflate, but if it doesn’t have enough oomph to begin with, your elements will sink into it. My mousse didn’t include gelatin, relying just on eggs for its structure, which was a mistake. I would have been better using Cool Whip or a more gelatinous mousse.
Layers and Layers of Chocolate
Most people need something to cut the sweetness of desserts. These are the people who say things like “it’s so rich.” I am happy eating a bowl of chocolate frosting with a brownie scoop.
This dirt nap pudding wasn’t far off from that.
The layer of strawberry sauce “helped” according to the few people who ate this trifle before it was sucked into the depths of my cavernous stomach, but, honestly, I could have eaten this entire thing with a spoon in one sitting.
I guess what I’m saying is: know yourself and know your audience.
Milk chocolate, dark chocolate, buttery chocolate brownies, fudgey chocolate ganache, and crunchy chocolate Oreo cookies were enough diversity for me to enjoy as I dug my way through this pudding’s dark morass, but I hear the note that some people need a moment of reprieve from rich cocoa assaulting them on all sides.
Maybe this movie had more impact on me than I realized…
A Skull Surprise
One GREAT surprise from this exercise was how easy it was to apply this skull design to the side of my trifle/glass vase.
I used a wax pencil to draw the skull on the outside of the glass and then used the cream from oreos to coat the inside. I figured the shortening-based cream would not only stick to the glass but also hold up well against the strawberry sauce and any other layer that didn’t set fully.
Honestly, no notes. You could also try buttercream to decorate the inside of a trifle, just make sure you really chill it before adding your layers.
Video Vixen
Having a friend that works in theatrical costuming really saved me from having to repaint my powder room after I Beverly Marsh’ed it working on this video.
Every video I try something a little different, and I’ll be so curious to see what these look like by the time I’m in the teens.
Like in all amateur creative pursuits, it’s interesting how even a tiptoe into this realm of production is making me look at YouTube videos, TV shows, and presentations with a totally different eye. It’s like the first time you learn about the concept of the story arc and suddenly start noticing “inciting incidents” in things you’ve watched hundreds of times before.
If nothing else, this foray into video is helping me in other areas of my work.
I’ll always remember this video as the one I REALLY REALLY REALLY didn’t want to do… but ultimately found pretty fun.
Recipes and Sources
Even though I highly recommend purchasing at least the fluff layer of this trifle, it actually only took me about fifty minutes to make its component pieces. Several of these had to chill for a few hours, but overall it was a pretty painless exercise, which I desperately needed since Cookie Season is upon us!
DIRT NAP PUDDING RECIPE (OR WHATEVER LAYERED PUDDING YOU’D LIKE)
Calculate the volume of the trifle you want to make.
My trifle dish was 5.5” in diameter and 7.5” high. This equated to approximately 12 cups of material needed. I confirmed this by pouring 12 cups of water into the dish.
Make or procure your layers!
Bulk - I made Sarah Keiffer’s brownies from 100 Cookies
One 9”x13” pan making 1” high brownies gave me approximately 3 cups of brownie.
Gloop - I made the dark chocoalte sea salt pudding from Ovenly
One recipe made 2.5 cups.
Fluff - I made the classic chocolate mousse from Sweet Paris, but I highly recommend using a store bought mousse or something with extra gelatin to hold the layers above it.
One recipe made 4 cups.
Crunch - I crushed up Oreos!
One package of double-stuffed Oreos, without their cream, was approximately 2 cups of crumbs.
Sauce (optional) - I made a simple strawberry sauce by draining the juice from frozen strawberries, reducing that liquid by 75% and then pureeing the thawed strawberries, reduced sauce, a squeeze of lemon, and sugar equaling about 20% of that mass (for me, it was 50 grams sugar).
This produced approximately 1.5 cups of sauce.
Gummi Worms (Only optional if it’s not dirt pudding. It can’t be called dirt pudding without gummi worms. These are the rules.)
Using a wax pencil, draw whatever design you’d like on the outside of your trifle.
Press buttercream or shortening-based cream on the inside of your trifle in the shape of your design.
If this is proving difficult, try using an offset spatula to help shape the design. I found that rolling the cream between my fingers and laying down coils of cream helped the cream stick to the glass and not my fingers.
Erase wax pencil marks.
With all your layers chilled (or bought), write out a roadmap for your trifle.
Bulk, Sauce, Gloop, Fluff, Worms, Crunch, Repeat
It’s best to cut the more solid Bulk into pieces and place them into the trifle. Be careful not to knock off the design as you place the elements.
At some point, you’ll totally lose the thread of your plan. Just keep going!
If you really want defined layers, make sure you press each layer into the side of the glass and do not just pour the next layer into the middle. You basically want to outline each layer and then fill in the middle.
Or… just don’t care about well defined layers and have at it!
Once all your layers are in, finish it off with the rest of your Crunch and place in the fridge to set.
The first scoop of the trifle is the most precarious, so don’t be dismayed by the explosive mess it will create.
Leave no survivors.
Don’t you dare tell me that’s not a horror movie.
