After two straight stews, it’s time to finally get back to dessert. And this one…was really something.

The Dish: Monster Cake

It’s said once you have a taste of this cake, you’ll never forget its sweetness. Ingredients are Tabantha Wheat, Goat Butter, Cane Sugar and Monster Extract.

The Method: To make monster cake, we must first answer the question: what is monster extract? And I have a theory: it’s simple food dye. Now, I know that in the past I’ve been incredibly open about my laziness, so you may be wondering if this is more of the same, and…no, I’m fairly convinced it’s just food dye. My reasoning is threefold!

FIRST, I don’t see how else it fits in otherwise. If you look at the five monster recipes, you’ll notice a wide variety of flavors, from spicy (Monster Curry) to savory (Monster Stew), to sweet (this one). It’s highly unlikely that one ingredient would be the linchpin of all five of them. Plus, they all appear to include everything they need without the monster extract. For example, this cake! If I was gonna bake a cake, I’d say sugar, butter and flour were pretty necessary. Our cake was ready to go without the extract, so what does it add?

SECOND, we already make food dye in a similar way. Certain red dyes are made by grinding up cochineal beetles, so it’s feasible that monster extract – whose creation process aside from grinding up monsters is unclear – likely only just dyes your food.

And THIRD, it’s totally possible to fool people with a little food dye. Here’s a study where wine connoisseurs were fooled with some red food dye. It’s entirely possible that some enterprising Hylian chef used food dye to trick unsuspecting diners. “You eat with your eyes”, they say. If you handed someone purple cake and told them you had some sort of super-special awesome secret ingredient in there, they’d probably assume you were telling them the truth and rate it accordingly!

So with that settled, it’s time to make some cake! The Monster Cake itself looks like chocolate cake with purple frosting, so that’s what we’ll make. I don’t feel like making a full cake, so I’m gonna just whip up this cupcake recipe. I figure for each Monster Cake I’ll do a layering of two cupcakes with frosting. Gonna go ahead and slip you a spoiler warning: don’t do this.

Once the ingredients are combined and the cupcakes are in the oven, it’s frosting time! Now I am not much of a baker and I’ve never dealt with food dye before, and I’ve just gotta say: there’s probably some sort of method or device designed to easily work with food dye, and you should probably use it if so. That said, with judicious combination of red and blue food dye, I was eventually able to work up a decent-looking purple frosting:

The cupcakes finished in time, and we had some cake to ruin!

The Result: I’m gonna be straight here – I failed. The cupcakes tasted good, but they weren’t amenable to being layered at all. My Monster Cake looked like all Monster and no Cake. I didn’t even bother taking a picture because, let’s face it, the Internet has enough cake disasters by this point.

All that to say this: if you do make it, just whiz up a standard layer cake like the good lord intended. Use biscuit cutters from there to form your smaller pieces. My cake failed. But, if nothing else, I at least solved the mystery of Monster Extract.