While this isn't a review of Portal, I will say this much – any game that can get me to upgrade my computer for the first time in 4 years and make me glad I did it has to have something going for it. Yeah, like every other reviewer, I enjoyed Portal. But there was one part of the game that stuck out to me: the constant discussion of cake.
As some might be aware, I enjoy cooking. I really enjoy it, to the extent that I actually do spend a significant amount of time thinking of new recipes and ways to cook old favorites. I'm the kind of guy who would actually squeeze genuine Key limes (about the size of a pinball) by hand to get enough juice to make a proper Key lime pie. Part of the reason I love Thanksgiving is because it gives me an excuse to sit and cook two straight days. To be honest, Portal put me in the mood to bake a cake that has yet to recede.
I could just go with a recipe I already have (I have requests to make an orange chiffon cake that have gone back about 4 or 5 years now), but I thought it'd be fitting to actually make the Portal cake. And I don't just mean one that looks like the one they show you after you handle GLaDOS. If I wanted that, I could go with Duncan Hines cake mix, a bit of frosting out of the ol' pastry bag (which looks so much naughtier when typed outside of a recipe), a bit of store-bought frosting, and some cherries or strawberries. Not exactly rocket science.
No, I mean the actual recipe recited in-game. For those not aware (either for not playing Portal or just not paying close attention), one of the spheres that gets knocked off of GLaDOS during the final battle is the so-called Cake Sphere, which has been named such because when you get close to it, it starts reciting a recipe for cake. Given how obsessed GLaDOS is with cake, this probably isn't much of a surprise. But it's one thing to hear her talk – constantly – about cake. It's another to actually grab the recipe and make it.
So I decide to do the sensible thing, and look online for a script of the game. I figure a game as popular for its humor as Portal would definitely have inspired someone to write the script out. Sure enough, it took me no more than five seconds, and that's only because bandwidth was a bit clogged when I tried my Google search on my end.
I probably should have been tipped off immediately that there would be something screwy with the recipe when the first line of the recipe called for chocolate cake mix – specifically, one package of it. I'm not disparaging cake mixes here. I have several in my cupboard right now. Duncan Hines makes a killer devil's food cake mix, which goes great with their dark chocolate frosting (but I digress). But when your recipe calls for using a giant shortcut like a cake mix, you should know immediately something is up. It'd be like a game FAQ telling you to start off by turning on a Gameshark.
But the real part to get alarmed about was once the Cake Sphere starts getting into the various things beyond the basics to put into your cake. The crackers? Kind of odd. The lemon juice (in a chocolate cake recipe)? Rather odd. But then, it starts getting into including dirt (shaped like fish for whatever reason – maybe GLaDOS has a sister that enjoys seafood), ethyl benzene (an industrial solvent), resins, and explosives. And if all that wasn't enough, it recommends licorice on top of all that. If toxic cake wasn't enough, visions of black jellybeans on cake are just giving me nightmares.
Of course, if the poison or the explosives don't get you, the needle gun and ammunition mentioned near the end of the recipe certainly will. On the bright side, the final ingredients are preservatives to prevent flesh from putrefying, so even though GLaDOS' cake has killed you a dozen different ways, what's left of your corpse will be in great condition to enjoy all the chocolaty goodness that went into making it. Plus, those resins are probably giving the remaining bits of you a nice shine, although you might need to be sanded.
In all seriousness, I can't help but think that the cake recipe just adds one more layer (ugh... bad cake puns) to all the jokes about the game. It seems the cake isn't a lie after all. If anything, while you'd have to come up with the cooking time and mixing directions on your own (I'm guessing all the dry stuff followed by all the liquid ingredients, and 350 degrees at around a half hour), the cake itself is potentially more real than anything else in the game. I mean, with some time and effort, you could actually make the cake yourself. Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that it's yet another one of GLaDOS' traps – just as she is more blatant about killing the character as the game goes on, her final task is giving a cake recipe that will kill the actual player if followed.
It all reminds me a bit of the classic line from when The Simpsons was actually good – it comes with a free frogurt... but the frogurt is also cursed. It turns out the cake is real after all. But it's GLaDOS' last attempt at trying to kill you. I'm not sure if this was just a random gag or an attempt to make GLaDOS' passive aggression that much more potent. But if nothing else, it does give us a sequel hook – trying to find a cake recipe that isn't instantly fatal. Until then, I think I'll just stick to the recipes I actually have, thanks.
