Real-life Video Game Foods: I Baked a Portal Cake

For as long as games have had fanboys, those fanboys have tried to recreate the elements of worlds they love using the much less cooperative matter of reality. On the other hand, some games just happen to feature foods that already exist, whether we’d like them to or not.  Here are some of my favorites:

Mario: Poison Mushroom

The bright, spotted fungus, “true enemy of any avid Mario player,” exists in the wild under the name of amanita muscaria, and like in the game, it will hurt you.  True, you might have to scarf down as many as fifteen of them before you actually die, but if you’ve mistaken it for the friendlier red and orange booster mushrooms from the original Mario, you might have to restrain yourself.  Maybe some sort of rhyme would help us tell apart the red and white and the red and orange, if only something rhymed with orange.

Portal: Cake

Well, of course I have to mention the Portal cake. Such a cake, hauntingly held before the mind’s eye by the manipulative GLaDOS – such a reward, hued with the promise of a party – the cake that was a lie will forever live in my dreams.

Dozens of Portal Cake look-alikes cropped up all over the ‘nets last year, and a few were actually pretty accurate. One blogger followed the precise recipe as given by the near-death half-sentient blue supercomputer component and ended up with an edible dish, though he never added such garnishes as fish shaped solid waste or sediment shaped sediment.  Anyone else up for the task?

Sneak King: Burgers

You may remember Sneak King, the Burger King franchise in which you stalk random strangers in order jump out at them and feed them delicious hamburgers, just like in those frightening commercials. You played that one, right? Let me assure you, it was a wild success. Yes.

Whoppers are, unfortunately, concocted every day at your local Burger King restaurant. They are a little greasier than their McDonalds counterparts, and are not worth any more of my attention.

Fallout: Iguana on a stick

Meet Iguana Bob, owner of the questionable iguana kebab stand in a questionable post-nuclear world. If you poked around a particular basement, you probably realized that some of those chunks of meat were human as well as iguana.

Iguana meat has been a Mexican dish for “several thousand years,” although better prepared in a form that does not involve a stick.  However, the lost traveler may, if lucky, stumble onto a roadside vendor wielding roasted reptiles impaled upon actual sticks.  Yummy!

So go out there and throw burgers at people, avoid the spotted mushrooms, disprove “the cake is a lie,” cook your brother’s pet reptile, or whatever you need to do to really savor your favorite games.