Terrific Cakes: The Witches-Cress, Lemon, and Fennel Cake
The Witches (1990)
My memories about “The Witches” are muddy.
I liked it.
I was terrified of it.
I KNOW I loved looking at it.
…
I wonder why?
A Villain I Love…but Don’t Root For? Am I Homophobic?
After rewatching Hocus Pocus recently, I was so confident The Witches would befall a similar fate:
Not as good as I remember.
Too much time on the kids and not the camp witch we all came to see.
Rooting for the charming villains over the obnoxious kids.
I was dead wrong.
Now don’t get me wrong, Anjelica Huston is a goddess in this movie. A wicked, torturous, sadistic goddess that is impossible to look away from and impossible to fully hate.
And yet… am I a self-hating gay because I don’t want her to win?!
The Grand High Witch isn’t someone I root for. She isn’t someone I want to succeed. She’s fabulous to look at, accidentally hilarious, and absolutely the villain.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this… and it’s hard to put my finger exactly on why that is.
It’s not a position I (or many other queer people) find themselves in usually. Usually, I’m rooting for the villain.
The Little Mermaid? Team Ursula.
Hocus Pocus? Team Sanderson.
Batman Returns? Team Kyle.
(Also Maleficent, Scar, Courtney Shane, Poison Ivy, Chucky, Pussy Galore, HIM, Team Rocket, Skeletor, Jareth, Frank-N-Furter, and the Lord of Darkness.)
I want all of these villains to not only win, but thrive. There’s some alchemy of camp, rebellion, and status as an outcast that imbues these characters with empathy. You may not like what they’re doing, but you love the way they’re doing it.
Is it something about punching down? Something about seeing the outcast made villain that makes us root for them, even if their plan is as evil as the Grand High Witch’s?
I don’t think it’s that simple.
I suspect it has to do with the story structure more than the character themselves.
An Early All-is-lost Moment
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has basically made all-is-lost moments meaningless. If the entire universe is at threat in every movie, it gets pretty hard to believe the heroes aren’t going to triumph when they’re disarmed in the third act. But once upon a time this device had some weight.
The Witches’ all-is-lost moment comes about halfway through the movie.
After watching Bruno quite horrifyingly turn into a mouse, our hero Luke makes a daring escape only to ultimately be caught and turned into a mouse himself. I remember being so terrified at this moment as a kid. He didn’t get away. He and his grandmother didn’t outsmart the witches before he could be captured and condemned.
He lost.
But he didn’t give up.
The children in Hocus Pocus never really lose. They keep outsmarting the Sanderson sisters time and time again. Ariel is never in any real danger until the very end of the movie, and, even then, she’s just such a damsel in distress. Bruce Wayne is a trust fund baby. How is anyone supposed to root for him over the Executive Assistant thrown to her death by her industrialist boss?
Luke, who may avoid the curse of being an annoying child actor because his mouse puppet is so damn cute, doesn’t give up even though, by all accounts, he’s already lost.
There’s something magical about that. Something that feels right for a kid’s movie. Something that feels right for any story.
This is a niche reference (for some of you), but in the long-running video game series Final Fantasy, one of the hallmarks of the games, which are really just interactive epic fantasy stories, is that the villains often catastrophically alter their world. This is most beautifully done in Final Fantasy VI (1994), in which the villain literally cleaves the world in half. The entire second half of the game is not about saving the world, since it’s already been destroyed, but about banding together survivors to end the rule of its new god. In modern parlance, our heroes aren’t “reversing the snap.” The games’ map is literally retitled “The World of Ruin” in its second half. There’s no reversing the heroes’ loss. There’s only preventing further devastation.
The Witches has a similar feel. You get to see the result of the Grand High Witch’s scheme. You see the pain and hurt as the children are transformed. These transformations are sweaty, writhing, screeching spectacles accompanied by the gleeful laughter of the witches. It’s scary and a little sad.
Perhaps it’s this significant victory for the villain that prepares even my jaded little queer heart to root for the Grand High Witch’s demise. I haven’t just watched her trounce fabulously about the screen while talking about her villainy. I’ve seen it in action. It’s terrible. I don’t want her to win. I don’t want any of the witches to win. I want her to lose.
Maybe that makes me a bad gay.
I’ll have to think about that while I fondle my locket with Katharine Parker’s picture inside.
Cress, Lemon, and Fennel Cake
From afar, it may be difficult to see why this cake DESTROYED MY SOUL.
As oftimes happens with baking, the simplest element of this cake failed so catastrophically that I almost threw this whole cake in the bin.
I was inspired to make a cake based on the climactic confrontation with the witches wherein their cress soup turns them all into rats.
Lots of food in The Witches, almost all of a tea-time variety.
Such a simple cake, really… it was supposed to be so easy…
A cress cake, you say? How gross!
Far from it. You’d be surprised how great a lot of vegetables, even the sharp or antiseptic ones, translate when you put them in with a bunch of sugar, butter, and vanilla. This cake tasted great… it was the putting together of the cake that scarred my reality.
Cursed Cake
Cress Cake
To make a new flavor of cake, I like to start with a white cake recipe. I often use the white cake from either Perfect Cake or Wild Sweetness as a base.
Many blogs and recipes will tell you to use infused milk to get flavor into bakes. You do this by boiling your liquid and solid together and letting it steep. For most flavors I find this does practically nothing.
I prefer to infuse milk by pureeing my ingredients with the liquid and straining out the solids. Once I’ve infused a milk I either use it directly in a cake recipe, make it into a pastry cream as a filling, or use it in a German Buttercream. A fun side effect of this process is that this really makes you feel like an alchemist/bog witch.
Because I wanted the cress in this cake to come through even more, I opted to use 100 grams of pureed watercress and reduce my liquids (just milk) by 1/4, as I knew the puree would add a lot of liquid.
For the most part, this worked great. The cake was a little claggy, but it smelled and tasted lightly herbal and fresh.
A Gloopy Disaster
I return to cream cheese frosting a lot because it’s a nice, tangy flavor that competes well with the weird combinations I do.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a cream cheese frosting that really holds well while frosting. I suspect this is because I don’t like frosting that basically uses two pounds of powdered sugar like cement.
But of all the cream cheese frostings that have let me down, this was the worst.
When I tell you this was soup.
When I tell you I added corn starch and stuck this in the fridge for fourteen hours and I could still pour it.
When I tell you I had to saw off chop sticks to hold this cake together.
It’s hard to know exactly what went wrong.
I replaced about half of the cream cheese with goat cheese, but I’ve done that before to no ill effect. I put about 1 TBSP of fennel pollen in the frosting but that shouldn’t have done anything, either.
My guess is the frosting’s chemical collapse happened in either the length of time I beat the ingredients together or with the addition of the food coloring. The dye is the most obvious suspect, but I use gel-based dye, rather than liquid, so the 1/2 TBSP of black I put in shouldn’t have done this to the frosting.
But something did this. Maybe it was a curse?
The frosting ultimately set very soft after I put the cake in the freezer for three more hours… and added 2 TBSP of corn starch to it. After I moved the frozen cake back to the fridge something had happened to keep the frosting firm enough to stay on the cake, but it still wasn’t strong enough to hold buttercream flowers.
All of the flowers on the side started in the middle of the cake… and slide down to become its skirt.
Video Vixen
This was a difficult video to edit.
The original cut of the video was 42 minutes, which is absolutely too long. I know these vides are already too long, since most baking videos top out somewhere between ten and seventeen minutes, but I’m definitely discovering these are as much essay as they are instruction… probably even more essay than instruction if I’m going to be honest.
Watching how my tone of voice, body language, and grunts changed as I got more frustrated was an interesting exercise in self awareness. I guess this whole project is.
I am really loving the absurdity of costuming, but it’s already gotten to the point after six videos where I now need a costume closet.
What will this look like after another nineteen weeks?!
Recipes and Sources
With a successful frosting, this cake would have been very easy, light and delicious! The flavors were ultimately a great melange of tangy, herby, and buttery, if only the frosting hadn’t been so infuriating.
CRESS, LEMON, AND FENNEL CAKE RECIPE
Take your favorite white cake recipe and bake it by either infusing the milk with watercress (lighter flavor) or by using puree (stronger flavor). I used Thalia Ho’s White Rose Cake as a base recipe for this.
Infusing the milk: take 100 grams of watercress and, using an immersion blender, blend it with your milk. Strain this mixture to remove the solids and use the amount of liquid recommended in the recipe.
You shouldn’t need to adjust the baking time much, if at all, since you haven’t changed the ratios of the recipe.
i.e. If the recipe calls for 1 cup milk, you only want to use 1 cup total strained liquid.
Using puree: calculate the weight of approximately 1/4 of the recipe’s liquid ingredients, preferably in grams. Puree this weight of watercress and reduce the liquid by this same amount when you mix the cake.
You may need to bake the cake a little longer than usual. If you have a very hot oven, consider using baking strips to make sure the edges of the cake don’t burn before the center is done.
i.e. If the recipe calls for 1 cup of milk, that is approximately 240 grams. Puree 60 grams of watercress and mix it with 3/4 cup of milk, or 180 grams for the recipe.
Procure lemon curd. I made Claire Saffitz’s lemon curd from Dessert Person. It’s a great, SUPER sharp recipe, but feel free to buy it… curd can be its own exercise in frustration. I overcooked mine a bit, which was the only reason the cake was even able to stand upright…
Make a frosting…
I still think a cream cheese frosting would work well to balance out the sharp lemon and herby cress flavors of this cake. I used 1 TBSP of fennel pollen in the frosting, which tasted incredible, but was essentially soup.
Construct the cake using the frosting as a dam to hold in a sizeable amount of lemon curd between each layer.
Frost the cake and chill for at least an hour unless you used a VERY VERY sturdy frosting. You want to make sure the weight of the layers aren’t squeezing out your lemon curd.
Make a small batch of American Buttercream. I made approximately 2 cups, and I didn’t use it all.
I KNOW! I KNOW! I hate this frosting, too, but it really is the best for decorative elements like flowers.
Divide your American Buttercream into three bowls and tint them using purple and fuschia dye. You want three distinct shades of purple on the red side of the color wheel.
Fit three piping bags with WILDLY different sized piping tips and fill each with a different color.
At complete random, riddle your cake with first one color, then the next, and finally the last. Start with the largest tip and use the other two to fill in the gaps. It’s a simple, easy way to make your cake looks more complex than it really is.
For the eyes, I rolled modeling chocolate into globes and dipped them in royal icing (egg whites + powdered sugar). My icing was mixed to a flooding consistency. This basically means a royal icing that fully reabsorbs if dripped into itself. I mixed three different shades of purple to mimic the purple eyes of the witches and to supply a shimmery lavender eye shadow to my grand high cake.
For eyelashes, I used black fondant rolled into a wide log and sliced twice, vertically. I gathered these lashes around a toothpick which also served to help hold the eyes in place.
Slice.
Eat.
Leave no survivors.
My royal icing irises got messy during a time I could not be bothered to try them again.
Capital “S” Spielberg.
