Terrific Cakes: You’ll Just Die (If You Don’t Get This Recipe) - Ring Ding Surprise
The Stepford Wives (1975)
I consider The Stepford Wives to be one of the five most terrifying movies.
Seriously.
This movie fills me with such a deep, overwhelming anxiety and sense of foreboding that it takes me days to recover.
If you haven’t seen it: go watch it now. It’s currently free on YouTube… and nowhere else that I could find.
If you’ve seen the remake: rinse it from your mind and go watch the original. I rewatched the remake in preparation for this and…it’s so much worse than I remembered.
The remake is uniquely bad not only because it is a movie absolutely destroyed by network notes (the Wikipedia and IMDB trivia section are a masterclass in ruining a film) but because it misses the point of The Stepford Wives entirely. The remake delights in its campaign to make the audience HATE the women we should be rooting for. Joanna starts the movie tearing apart a marriage as a network executive. A network executive. Bobbie wears only black, is married to an imbecile, and has no discernible personality beyond “cutting.” And the gay character replacing Charmaine… well… I appreciate what a gay Stepford would look like, but 2005 was not ready for that conversation. The remake also takes great pains to justify how spectacular the women killed in Stepford are (although the remake can’t decide if its women are killed, replaced, or brain-transplanted?), as if we should only care that these women were dehumanized, raped, and murdered because they were so exemplary.
The original texts don’t try to justify why you should care that these women are being murdered. The book and the 1975 film are full of complex, messy, funny women, and when they are murdered by their husbands, it is devastating because they are so alive, not because the film needed to convince us they were worthy of autonomy.
The Stepford Wives is about a lot of things, but at it’s heart, it’s about who we consider human. Who we consider worthy of dreams. Who can have the faculty for ambition. Who deserves the pursuit of happiness. Who deserves the power to make decisions and steer the course of their own lives.
The men in The Stepford Wives kill their wives, but before they do that, they betray them. They choose to kill them MONTHS AND MONTHS before the act is done. I mean, it takes time to build sexbots. It takes time to record the women’s voices and capture all the details of their bodies, or at least the ones they’re not planning on changing.
It’s a realization I didn’t catch the first time I watched the movie, just how early on our protagonist, Joanna, was sold out by her husband, Walter. It’s no surprise, though, since Joanna, in an incredibly honest scene, confronts Walter about all the times he’s made decisions for her while pretending they were making them together. He pretends to bring up something as a point of discussion, when in fact he’s already decided. By the time Joanna confronts Walter about the Men’s Association, her fate is already sealed. It may have been sealed before the movie even begins.
Walter moved them to Stepford.
Walter bought the house without consulting her.
Walter joined the men’s association before talking to her.
Walter chose to kill her and replace her with something that wouldn’t question him, would only be subservient to him, FOUR MONTHS before they kill her. He slept next to her, and with her, for FOUR MONTHS knowing what he was going to do.
The horror of that.
The betrayal to Joanna, to all the women of Stepford, is so much more than just reading the men as callous conservatives wanting a return to “the way things were.” It’s not just men pushing against women’s desire for equality, it’s a full-throated confession that these men don’t consider women worthy of free will.
And the horror lies in the fact that these smart, enlightened, funny women chose these men. These are the ones they chose as their partners in life. These are the men they thought were on their side. Joanna and Bobbie (maybe not Charmaine) married men they thought they had a partnership with. Was it always a lie?
As the women are changed one-by-one, they grasp at other explanations for the changes happening to the people around them. Bobbie “goes away” with her husband without a speck of fear or uncertainty. She’s certain the problem in Stepford must be endemic to the town, not to the man that moved her there. She doesn’t imagine it could be that dark. How could she?
Mommy’s Little Helper
So the first layer of terror we’re dealing with is the betrayal: the disregard for the women in these relationships to be seen not just as equal partners, but as humans deserving of free will.
The second layer hits a little closer to home as someone living in the suburbs of NYC after having a successful career through their 20’s and 30’s, and suddenly finding themselves at home… baking… in the suburbs.
It’s fun to make fun of the suburbs as you’re dodging rats on the subway in your 20’s and overnighting roach motels to your shared apartment. It’s easy to say “I would never,” but the first time you go to a friend’s house? The first time you spend a weekend with a garden and a pizza stone? It’s over. The illusion is shattered. You may not ever move to the suburbs, but the seed of tempation is planted.
I’m not saying anyone wants to be turned into a robot, but the simplicity of life in Stepford. The ease of living. The privilege and comfort of a clean home, meals prepared, and homes full of fresh cut flowers is not an image of hell so much as one of earthly delights.
The movie creates this foreboding atmosphere by overwhelming us with soft lighting and delicate piano music. Everyone’s just so happy. The men are happy. The women aren’t bothered. The only people upset are the ones yet to get with the program. If Joanna and Bobbie would just stop thinking so much, they’d be happy, too.
Less anxious.
It’s almost like the whole town is medicated.
There’s some justification that Ira Levin was inspired to write The Stepford Wives at least partially because of the influence of Miltown and the other tranquilizers marketed and prescribed en masse to the housewives of the 60s. Miltown became Vallium and Vallium became Prozac and Prozac became Oxy. Those aren’t perfect throughlines, but the idea is that for at least the last fifty years, people lost and lonely in the suburbs have had access to ways to sedate themselves against isolation. This access is made all the more easy in white communities filled with money and privilege. No one’s going to arrest the mayor’s wife because she’s abusing pills, even if it causes a fender bender at the Piggly Wiggly.
It’s easy to watch The Stepford Wives and pick it apart because of the impracticalities of replacing the women with robots. After all, won’t their children notice that mommy never ages? But as the women walk through the shopping aisles of the grocery store, blandly greeting each other and speaking in voices just above unconsciousness, it’s not so hard to squint my eyes and see the seductive enticement of submitting to the bucolic comforts of a life in Stepford.
Big hats.
Toned arms.
Soft voices and an unconscious glow insulating you against pain, discomfort, anxiety, pain, pleasure, desire, and ambition.
Scary stuff.
Who needs to be turned into a robot when it’s so convenient to do it to myself?
Ring Ding Surprise
There isn’t an iconic moment in The Stepford Wives that I could think of when it came time to think “cake.”
I knew I wanted to do something with a cake mix, and I honestly just reconsidered semi-homemaking a cake by buying one at the grocery store and just refrosting it. This is literally something social media bakers do to produce more content. I was shocked when I learned this, but also impressed by the ingenuity. It’s a sad reminder that most of the content we see is manufactured in ways that betray its intent (throwback to that remake!), but we’ll see how I feel if anyone ever starts paying me to push out ten posts a week on buttercream roses!
In the movie, Bobbie and Joanna bond over Ring Dings and Scotch. It’s a touching, funny scene and in a few lines of dialogues makes you yearn to be these women’s friend. So from this great interaction, the idea of making something that looked like a Ring Ding on the outside, but was secretly stuffed with traditional American food porn was born. Originally I wanted to do an apple pie in the middle, but the combination of only 10” apple pies at my grocery store and the hesitation about apple pie and chocolate cake together led me to cherry. It was the right choice.
My “notes” are basically just my favorite quotes…
Simple idea… complex order of operations.
The baking portion of this Terrific Cake was pretty easy (once I told myself it was okay to buy a pie instead of make one). Even assembling the cake went pretty smooth once I tackled its order of operations.
Checklists are our friends.
Cherry Surprise
A Pie In the Middle of A Cake
I forget when I first saw a pie in the middle of a cake, but it took me a surprisingly long time to try it myself.
All I kept wondering was “how does the pie bake in the middle of a cake?”
Ummmm….
That’s obviously not how it works.
Just like you don’t bake cake layers on top of each other, you don’t bake the pie with the cakes. You make everything separately and then assemble.
This is a great upgrade to an otherwise boring cake, just be cautious of the weight pressing down on the pie. This cherry pie started to collapse over the five days this cake lived, but something like a custard or creme pie might collapse immediately without refrigeration to firm up the frosting. Plan accordingly!
BUt I don’t LIke that Much Frosting
When people tell me they don’t like frosting, I always ask which frosting they mean.
My guess is that most people who don’t like “too much frosting” are talking about things like American Buttercream, Cream Cheese Frosting, or fondant. It’s like someone saying they don’t like New York City and finding out they’ve only been to Times Square, SoHo, and Battery Park.
I’m not saying the choices above are bad, I’m just saying that I also would prefer almost anything instead of them.
Enter one of the best frostings: ermine!
Ermine (also known as boiled-milk frosting) uses a boiled flour compound as its body, which keeps the frosting from being too sweet. For this cake, I whipped it almost twice as long as is recommended, so the frosting was super aerated and fluffy. This would be a problem if I wanted a smooth, finished cake, but since I was looking for the frosting to resemble Ring Ding creme, overwhipping it all worked great.
If you find yourself leaving the frosting on the side of your plate when you eat cake, try using ermine next time.
If you still leave the frosting on the side, I’m afraid it’s you. You’re the problem.
Cake Mix
A few months ago, on a whim, I bought a Duncan Hines cake mix and made it.
I have great memories from childhood of this super moist cake and its rich, velvety taste.
I made the cake with high expecations… and thought it tasted like cardboard. It was fluffy and moist, but practically flavorless.
At the time, I was upset because I thought my palette had gotten too snobby. Literally I wondered if the abundance of homemade cakes I bake had ruined me for cake mixes.
It’s hard to know if this sad cake was a one off, if my memory had artificially inflated my enjoyment of cake mixes, if my palette is too-cool-for-school now, or if Duncan Hines changed their formula sometime in the twenty years. Probably a bit of everything.
Regardless, I was super excited when one of my favorite Instabakers, BitsyCakes, posted on their feed a recipe to pump up cake mixes. A few more eggs, some coffee, and vanilla made these cakes incredible!
A cake mix is really just the pre-measured dry ingredients of a recipe. There shouldn’t be any reason they aren’t delicious, but…. I’d recommend sticking with BitsyCakes and avoiding the back-of-the-box instructions for the foreseeable future.
This week: watch me learn basic filters!
Video Vixen
The algorithms that dictate what we see on our feeds are really an exercise in masochism. It’s curious to put a lot of work into some things and see them die on the vine, and barely touch others and see them take off. The internet is not a meritocracy (is anything?), so I want to thank you again for reading this.
If you enjoy it, I really would love for you to share it with people you think would get a kick out of it. Every share and like helps… help towards what, I don’t know… maybe just towards me laughing at the thought of someone laughing at me in that tied-off crop top.
Who would have thought this project was also going to make me more comfortable in my own skin? Talk about an unexpected twist.
Recipes and Sources
Although all the parts of this Ring Ding Surprise are simple recipes, its assembly requires some forethought and planning. Ideally, you would make the cakes and pie one day ahead and assemble the next, but I was able to get it all done over the course of about five hours because I bought a pie.
Cake: Betty Crocker’s Chocolate Fudge mix amplified by Bitsy Cakes’ recipe!
Frosting: Ermine frosting from Zoe Bakes Cakes.
Cherry Pie: Store bought! If you are going to make a cherry pie, I’ve had good luck with the fruit pies from Pie Camp. There’s some argument to be made for a store bought pie since their crusts are super strong and you know the filling is going to be very well set.
Eyes: Maraschino Cherries and Betty Crocker Eyes.
Assembly:
If making your pie surprise, I’d recommend making it the day before to make sure you’ve given it a lot of time to come to room temperature and set.
Bake two 8” chocolate cake layers and chill in fridge.
BitsyCakes recipe makes three 8” cake layers, but because I wanted them overfilled, I only used 80% of the batter. I used the remaining 20% to make a personal-sized 6” cake.
Tip: Since you’re messing with the volume of your batter, your cakes will take longer to cook. Use a timer starting at 10% longer, but also trust your nose: when a cake is nearly complete its scent becomes MUCH stronger.
You want the cakes chilled enough to carve without falling apart but not so hard that you can’t cut them easily.
Boil the ermine frosting flour base until it is a pudding consistency and let it cool to room temperature.
It must be absolutely the same temperature as your butter or it will melt your butter rather than whip up into frosting.
Cut each cake layer in half and carve out a sizable portion of its middle. Set aside these cake scraps… preferably into your mouth. You don’t need them anymore.
Whip the cooled ermine frosting flour mixture with butter to create the ermine frosting. Whip it to excess as we are going for a fluffy, whipped topping: we’re not concerned about getting too much air into it.
Fill the carved out portions of the cakes with ermine frosting and create two stacks by reassembling the cake layers you cut apart earlier. Essentially you’re making two giant Ring Dings!
Place one “ring ding” on a turntable (or cake stand) and smooth a small amount of frosting on top of it. There should be enough frosting to hold your surprise pie in place.
Place your surprise pie on top of the frosted “ring ding.”
Using a piping bag or offset spatula, fill in the gaps between the pie and the bottom cake layers.
Smooth another small amount of ermine frosting on top of the surprise pie and place your second “ring ding” on top of it.
Crumb coat this tower of cream-filled cakes and pies with the remainder of the ermine frosting.
Place this tower of sweetness into the fridge for approximately 20 minutes to chill the outer surface. This will help the ganache set quicker and give a little stability to the frosting.
If you notice significant bulging around the pie, as if the top “ring ding” is smashing your pie and pushing it out the sides, place the crumb-coated cake in the freezer, potentially with some dowels in it. The freezer will firm the butter in the frosting faster, so the weight of the cake is not just on the pie.
Make a chocolate ganache with your desired chocolate (I used 60% chocolate chips).
My favorite way to do ganache is to heat the cream until just simmering, pour it over my chopped chocolate (or chocolate chips), wait three minutes, and stir. It’s just that easy!
If your ganache separates or is clumpy, there are a TON of ways to save it, so don’t despair. Fixing ganache is suprisingly easy with a quick google search (it’s usually adding more hot or cold cream, depending on the issue, and whipping vigorously).
Fill a small piping bag with ganache (seal both ends of the bag with rubber bands or paper clips) and place this reserved ganache in the fridge for half an hour until it sets into a pipeable consistency.
Once the ganache is your desired consistency (you want it jussssst this side of molasses: pourable but not runny), bring out your cake and pour it over the chilled crumb coat.
Be aggressive with your pour. Once the ganache sets it’s very difficult to add more. Have a spatula ready and don’t be afraid of smoothing it out.
Like nail polish, though, once the ganache gets tacky to the touch: stop futzing with it! It’s as good as it’s going to get at this point.
This coated cake can go back in the fridge for a few minutes to help the ganache set, but even just leaving it at room temperature for a few minutes will set the ganache because of the chilled cake exterior.
Take your reserved piping bag of ganache and add whatever decorative elements you’d like! If the ganache is too firm to pipe, simply massage it a little with your hands: it warms up very quickly!
Top off the cake with the eyes of your choice (I used maraschino cherries and Betty Crocker’s candy eyes).
Devour.
Leave no survivors.
Thanks for your eyes! Follow and share on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube!
Join me the week after next (12/2) for The Descent (2005).
This is definitely the goriest and most violent of the movies covered so far, so…. I better put down a drop cloth.
I loved this movie when it came out, but haven’t seen it since. Let’s see if the last seventeen years have changed my opinion of a female-led horror movie. Hmm….
#spelunking
