Terrific Cakes: The Fly- BrundleBurger with Toasted Sesame and Cheddar Cheese

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A Horrific Body of Work

For all of my aversions to torture porn, you may be surprised that I’m actually a pretty big fan of body horror. Well… body horror done right. And no one does it righter than David Cronenberg.

Body horror is often the most graphic of all horror. Buckets of blood and mountains of slimy latex body parts are not uncommon in the exploitative twisting of this horror subgenre. Elements of body horror pop in a lot of the other genres of horror, too, but for something to really be body horror the focus of the movie needs to be on the physical violation of the terror. The scare is the loss of control of one’s body. Body horror elicits an empathetic, almost phantom-pain response from the audience. It makes you cringe because you can almost feel the sensation of the violation the characters are going through.

If you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly, you know that feeling well.

But First!

If you haven’t seen this movie (and there’s such a strong chance you haven’t), I really encourage you to do so.

Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum give incredible performances. Every time I watch this movie, which actually has been every six months of so since COVID happened, there is a moment I yell at the screen, “You did not need to go this hard, Geena (or Jeff), but I’m so glad you did!”

The charisma and chemistry oozes out of these two like it’s the last thirty minutes of the script. This may have been because Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum were dating at the time, but I choose to believe they would have been this transformational regardless. This movie could have fallen into hysterical B-movie screaming so easily, but the performances of the two A-list leads keep it emotional and its characters empathetic.

The body horror is intense, but the practical effects are so well done that it’s also captivating to watch. Just thinking about the how of The Fly makes it worth watching.

Violations

I don’t remember the first time I watched The Fly, but the first time I watched it not on TV was probably in my late 20’s. This is not a movie to be watched edited for TV (although… maybe that experience doesn’t even exist anymore?).

The violating nature of The Fly’s body horror is largely due to the degenerative nature of Brundle’s (Jeff Goldblum) experiment gone awry. The gradual metamorphosis of Brundle from human to fly keeps the audience enticed and repulsed at the same time, because, although the Academy Award winning special effects are difficult to watch, the relatively calm, good-natured Brundle lends every scene a sickening allure. He approaches his body’s collapse and transformation with the same curiosity and diligence social media gives to popping pimples, or peeling off dead skin. It’s grotesque, yet relatable and satisfying? It’s resistance, tension, release, bright pain, and, finally, relief. Every bit of Brundle’s genesis feels purposeful and correct in a disgustingly satisfyin way.

While Brundle’s deterioration is self-inflicted (the first transference with the fly was an accident but you see him go into the chamber over and over and over and over further messing up his DNA, which is a beautiful way to write in a more gradual transformation than the instant metamorphosis of the original film), Geena Davis’ bodily violation is just as terrifying. Her pregnancy and demand for an abortion feels, unfortunately, even more relevant now than it might have in 1986. I’m always impressed when characters don’t hem and haw over their choice to have an abortion in a film. The choice to terminate her pupal pregnancy is opposed by Brundle, extending the horror of his body violently onto hers. The idea that something growing inside her is the result of an unintended violation from her diseased lover… the idea that what he inseminated her with may kill her, too.. feels… well…

It’s not NOT About AIDS (or Pregnancy or Ageing or Cancer or…)

I was rewatching The Fly with my friend Anne Marie for this Terrific Cake and they asked “This is about AIDS, right?” And honestly, no (but yes):

If you, or your lover, has AIDS, you watch that film and of course you'll see AIDS in it, but you don't have to have that experience to respond emotionally to the movie and I think that's really its power. This is not to say that AIDS didn't have an incredible impact on everyone and, of course, after a certain point, people were seeing AIDS stories everywhere, so I don't take any offense that people see that in my movie. For me though, there was something about The Fly story that was much more universal: aging and death—something all of us have to deal with.

David Cronenburg sums up the appeal and terror of The Fly, and probably body horror in general, so beautifully in this sentiment. He also sums up why this movie probably shot to the top of my rewatch pile during COVID.

The Fly is about your body falling apart. It’s about trying to improve your condition, but ultimately having to watch more and more pieces of yourself fail. It’s about watching your skin discolor, sag, and slough off. It’s about thinking you’ve found a solution to your maladies only for the invisible catalyst of your demise to continue its silent and deadly work.

During COVID, especially the period of COVID where we were wearing masks outside and wiping down our Amazon boxes with Clorox, it felt like we were all gambling with our health. No one knew what the actual symptoms were (remember when we thought holding your breath for fifteen seconds meant you didn’t have it) or how to prevent it (distance matters, no its exposure time, no its through particulate matter, no its living on surfaces!). Some of us, despite our best efforts, still got very sick. Some of us, because of our hubristic selfishness, spread the disease far and wide, insuring it found its way into the most vulnerable communities. All of us shared the body horror of living through an invisible agent violating our health and either killing or scarring us.

It’s funny to think about how quickly we’ve moved on.

That’s the rub (or sloughing) of body horror: you’ve just got to keep going. Just because you’ve contracted something, or your body is ageing, or your boyfriend potentially laid an egg in you that hatched into a maggot, doesn’t mean you give up. The only way out of body horror is through it, and we all know the real terror is that no one really gets out intact. If Brundlefly doesn’t get you, time will.

A Cake-xperiment Worthy of Brundle

When thinking about a cake for The Fly, my first thought was “I guess I should just make something that looks like a pile of raw hamburger.” The first image in my mind was the lumpy, bleeding mass of flesh Brundle deteriorates into by the end of the movie. Imagine my delight and surprise, then, when I realized on this rewatch that Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum bond over cheeseburgers!

After that, I did quite a bit of research into making Is-it-cake-style cheeseburgers. You know the ones. Cakes that look like other things. Airbrushed, fondanted-to-death experiments that look incredible but taste… well… it’s an art more than a cuisine. I’m sure there are some imitation cakes that taste good once you scrape off the layers of rice wafer paper, fondant, and synthetic dyes, but I’ve yet to find one. This is also a style of baking that I just don’t have the tools for.

I also really struggled with the flavors. My original thought was to do a red velvet cake covered with frosting so that when you cut into it, the burger would look “raw” inside. I think there’s an idea there: a cake that looks baked on the outside but is actually oozing and raw when cut into (yum!). I was nervous about how the frosting would look, but the obvious flavor made me pause even more.

This is The Fly! I needed to be out there! I needed to change humanity or at least be the agent of its demise!

I’ll leave you to decide which I came closer to…

BrundleBurger in Paradise

Chocolate + Tahini + Cheddar + Toasted Sesame

The first thing I knew about this cake was that it would be WEIRD.

The next few things I knew went something like this:

Hamburgers have sesame buns.
Cheeseburgers have cheese.
Cheese and sesame go together.
Sesame and chocolate go together.
Cheddar and sweet fruits go together.
Why can’t they all just go into the telepod together and come out more than the sum of their parts?

If you watch my video on this (subscribe to my YouTube! It’s the same but different!) you’ll see my face contemplate what I’m tasting for quite awhile after my first bite. I really didn’t know what to make of these flavors when I first tasted them, although I quickly came around to loving them.

The first thing to do when sampling a weird flavor combination is to determine whether it tastes bad.

This did not taste bad.

The next thing is to decide if you can actually taste all of the components: did you lose a flavor along the way and another super dominant. This happens all the time with florals and herbal flavors.

I could distinctly taste the tahini, toasted sesame, and chocolate. I could only taste the cheese when I got a thick slab of frosting.

The final step is to actually decide if it is good. Is it worth doing this again?

There are lots of combinations of flavors that are fine, but end up being less than the sum of their parts. This happens a lot with cooking, where you add so many different spices and bits and pieces that the end result just kind of tastes bland. I’m not a fan of most mac and cheese for this reason. People keep adding more and more cheeses without actually thinking of the right balance or how the flavors accentuate each other and it kind of ends up with all the cheeses melding into one flavor.

This cake did NOT meld and it was such a unique flavor that it took me awhile to decide that I liked it.

Honestly, it probably took until the third day. I’m writing this five days after making the cake and we’re still eating it. I’ve found myself cutting bigger and bigger slices every night and craving the flavors. The blend of nutty sesame, bitter chocolate, and tangy, bright cheddar buttercream activate so many different tastebuds. I wish I had put more buttercream into the cake because the flavor really blossomed, but the crunchy sesame seeds in the white sesame layers adds a nice textural difference.

Overall this was an experiment that worked better than I thought it was going to, but I wasn’t sure the world was ready for it. I’m happy to report that I fed this cake to a large group of friends and I’d say it was LOVED by five, liked by another seven or eight, and tolerated for the last three. Overall a success for such a strong flavor. Full disclosure: I really had to push it on some people… it’s not a flavor combo that most people want to try.

Ten Pounds of Cake

It’s a good thing I think this flavor works, because I made a ten pound cake.

Oops.

I wanted a rounded top to my cake, and although I could have sworn I had a 6” hemisphere pan I could only find an 8” in my cabinet… so I made 8” layers for the cake… and literally as I was putting away the pans after washing them I found two 6” hemisphere pans.

So this could have been a monstrous 5.5 lb cake… but that wasn’t its destiny.

Luckily, when you bake with weight, it’s pretty easy to adjust the size of your cakes by using percentages.

So although the recipe card is written to make 10 lbs of Brundleburger, I highly encourage you to reduce all the recipes by ~40% and make a six inch tower to the hubris of man’s intellectual pursuits. Cooking time won’t decrease as much as you think (maybe only 2-3 minutes) because the depth of the cakes will remain similar while the surface area dramatically decreases.

Cheese Slices

The biggest failure of this bake was my attempt to make cheese slices out of my cheddar buttercream.

I’ve seen these buttercream transfers done a lot on IG and Youtube, but methinks they’re using American Buttercream, which freezes basically as hard as a stick of butter. I used a creamy yolk-based buttercream mixed with cheese powder, so it just didn’t have the stability I wanted.

I was able to scrape together some bits of cheddar, though, and I think the effect of a ragged tongue worked out just right for this assault against God.

Next time I’d just spread the buttercream with an emphasis on piling it up on the edges of each layer. The weight of the next cake layer would smush some of the buttercream out so it would look like melted cheese.

Video Vixen

I’m not sure why I was so terrified to make this cake, but I really was.

Somewhere between not being happy with my idea and the fear of never making a realistic looking cake, I just froze. I delayed this cake for over a full week before one day I jumped out of bed at 5AM to draw a new cake. I worked out afterwards and then spent the next six hours making it.

It’s funny how creativity works… and funny how this project has worked.

I’m often filled with so much anxiety thinking about the bake and thinking about preparing my kitchen to record myself, but the moment I hit record, all of that anxiety goes away. No matter what tragedy befalls my cakes (and watch The Witches bake if you really want to see me fall apart), I feel so comfortable in front of the camera. It puts everything into perspective.

And yet…

The anxiety (not nerves) is nearly crippling beforehand.

I guess I really just need a production team to set everything up for me to just walk on set and perform… any volunteers?

Recipe CARDS

(Right click to save the images and print them out!)

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Join me next time as I watch a movie you’ve likely either never heard of or that SCARRED your childhood in a deep, unforgettable way: RETURN TO OZ!!!

Fairuza Balk, decapitations, petrification, electroshock therapy, the wheelies, JEAN FUCKING MARSH!

This is a children’s movie.