Bonus 2: SBLOUNKSCHED! Bar from Homestar Runner

Ah, Homestar Runner. It’s given us so much and asked for so little. Well, it’s time to make a monstrosity from their history.

The Dish: SBLOUNSKCHED! Bar

“We’ll start with a gaseous cloud of marshmallow vapor…encased in a globule of semi-solid licorice colloid. A bunch of those will be floating in a channel of liquid nougat…we roll all that up inside a solid crispety cookety log…and cover it with rich, creamy…pepperoni. Then sprinkle that with, not just crispy puffed rice, but whole tiny bowls of crispy puffed rice cereal. And finally, smother that with…Boring Brown Chocolate.”

The Method: Yup, this one’s gonna be a nightmare. See, my original plan was to put marshmallow creme in the licorice (the closest I can think of to “gaseous marshmallow vapor”), but the licorice was solid, not hollow. After a quick trip to get some Twizzlers, I found that they were stiff and unworkable. So I microwaved them for a bit to soften them up…this flattened them. So I abandoned this plan, whizzed up some Twizzlers in a blender…

…and mixed them with marshmallow creme.

With that out of the way, it’s time to look at our pepperoni. Now, every recipe I’ve seen for this says “it’s good…except for the pepperoni”. I figure if I make the pepperoni sweeter somehow, that’ll improve it, or at least make it less of a liability. So I made this glaze and let the pepperoni soak in it. With the pepperoni out of the way, it’s time to make nougat. I made the filling from this recipe. Not much else to say.

Once the nougat is made, it’s time to assemble this monstrosity. I started with a bed of safe-to-eat-raw cookie dough, then slathered on a layer of the marshmallow/Twizzler mixture, followed by a layer of nougat. I then closed it and made my best attempt to form it into a bar.

With this done, I topped the thing with some shredded glazed pepperoni, some Rice Krispies cereal, and finally cloaked the whole thing in some melted semi-sweet chocolate, which, as the industry standard, is Boring Brown Chocolate in its truest form.

All that’s left is to let this abomination harden in the fridge. Now I already failed at making it into a bar – it looked more like some kind of dessert meatloaf – but maybe that’s where my failure ends.

The Result: Yeah, this was really bad. Really, really bad. The pepperoni overpowered everything else, even with my attempts to neutralize it, which arguably made it worse. Absent the pepperoni, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great (except the nougat, which I nailed on the first try, and was awesome). I’ll definitely be revisiting this in the future because I have a few ideas as to how to improve it, but for now, I definitely feel like I got SBLOUNKSCHED!

BOTW 2: Monster Cake

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

There’s more to it than this, but I didn’t wanna crowd the shot.

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.

Number 1: Saghert and Cream

Hello! If you’re new to this, I’m some guy who likes to cook and likes playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I decided to combine them for some reason! What fun. Let’s get to it.

The Dish: Saghert and Cream

Ingredients: 1 Peach Currant, 1 Noa Fruit

The Research: I decided to start my journey with the most mystifying entry into the cookbook: the confusingly-named “Saghert and Cream.” No doubt I and many others have wondered: “what on Earth is ‘Saghert’ supposed to be”? After some Googling I found this Reddit thread that suggests that it’s a mistranslation of “sagart”, an old word meaning “priest”. So in other words: “Blessed Fruit and Cream”. Since the equally-perplexing Noa Fruit is supposedly blessed, this tracks.

The next question: what is Noa Fruit? Based on my research of what area I’ve surmised Fodlán is meant to represent from around that time, I’m thinking apples. Maybe it’s meant to be a unique fruit, but I figure apples are delicious, ubiquitous and easy enough to come by to work. I went with apple cider for reasons that will be made clear later. Now for the other ingredient: peach currant, which isn’t a thing. Peaches are a thing. Currants are a thing. “Peach currant”, except in the minds of our demented Tomacco-dreaming farmers, is absolutely not a thing. But nonetheless, whatever is compelling me to write this demands accuracy, so peach currants we will make.

The Method: I’m guessing from both the in-game photo and recipe description that this is meant to be a cobbler of some sort, but I called what will be the first of many audibles and made a crumble. It’s easier and more delicious than a cobbler, flying in the face of all your parents’ maxims that hard work automatically leads to a better life. Confront them immediately! But not before you’re done reading this.

To make the filling, I started by slicing the peaches, removing the heinous pits therein and chopping them to the desired size. Once the peaches were perfectly prepared, I hit ‘em with some sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice and allspice and rolled ‘em around. I then made good on the second half of the first ingredient by stirring in some blackcurrant preserves (as an aside, it’s simply impossible to find the fresh stuff in my region of the US, so this was all I could do). With the filling complete, all that I had to do was roll around some flour, sugar, butter, and salt to make a crumble topping, which kind of feels like wet sand. I threw the filling in a casserole dish, topped it with the…topping, and set it in a warm oven for baking.

“But wait”, I imagine you saying, “what of the Noa Fruit?” To which I say, patience. You see, the recipe calls for a Noa Fruit cream, which I took to mean an apple-infused whipped cream. According to this recipe I helpfully obtained from Rachael Ray, that’s as easy as heavy cream, vanilla extract (I used Mexican vanilla), and cider syrup. That’s, uh, this stuff below:

All one has to do is reduce the cider down (way easier than it sounds), pour the syrup in the mixture, and whip until it has that “whipped cream” look. It’s then placed in the fridge to cool until our crumble comes out, which it eventually does.

The Result: Dare I say: really good? The decision to make it a crumble was an inspired one and the peaches and currants, two tastes I was unsure about combining, play together very nicely. The apple whipped cream wasn’t very apple-y, but that’s easy enough to tweak with a little research, and besides, something this good was meant to be topped with vanilla ice cream. All in all, I’d say this was a rousing success, and one I would make again in a heartbeat.

Recipe bases used: 1. “Best Peach Crumble”, Delish; 2. “How to Make Flavored Whipped Cream”, Rachael Ray In Season.

Disclaimer: this is a fan-based blog and has no affiliation with Nintendo or any other rightsholders of Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem Three Houses, or any other games associated with the brand. Blog author is not responsible for blowback when you confront your parents.