The poky little poké poke cake
Happy birthday, Davida!
Hey guys, it’s Davida again!
With things still being as hairy as they are in the world, it hasn’t been easy for Dennis and I to come up with ideas. After his recent interview with food critic Michael Nagrant, Dennis has seen a flood of new sign-ups and for a minute we were scrambling about what to do next.
After some fruitless brainstorming, we decided to look to a list of potential ideas we’ve had on the back burner for a year or so, and settled on one we’d previously been resistant to attempt out of sheer terror: Poké poke cake.
When I initially made this suggestion to Dennis, he was baffled. “What the fuck is poke cake?”
I was amazed he hadn’t heard of it, and assumed maybe it was specific to where I grew up or something.
After doing some research, I discovered that it wasn’t that it was a regional recipe-- it’s just that it’s super fucking outdated.
Poke cake is a type of cake that was developed by the Jell-O company hundreds of years ago, in the 1970’s, as a new way to push their product. Basically the whole idea is that you bake a cake, poke a bunch of holes in it, and then pour Jell-O mixture over it and let it set before frosting the whole thing with Cool Whip.
Even back then, this wasn’t exactly a new concept--the process is similar to tres leches cake, just with Jell-O instead--but the novelty of these colorfully striped cakes was enough to make it pretty popular for a while until it gradually fell off.
I was never much of a fan of it growing up, and the only reason I even learned of it was because my sister-in-law Mandy introduced it to my family as a staple in hers. So if the following post horrifies you, please address your hate mail “℅ Mandy.” (Just kidding, she’s awesome.)
Anyway, because I’m a shameless lover of terrible wordplay (if you can even call it that), I suggested making poke cake…with poké. As in the Hawaiian dish. Sushi cakes have definitely been made, but this would be different. This would be an instant All-American Classic. Obviously.
In order to get a good variety of fish, and also because we love any excuse to splurge on a sashimi platter, Dennis went to Joong-Boo Market, which is our neighborhood Korean store and also one of my favorite places to watch Dennis awkwardly converse with store employees who overestimate his fluency in Korean.
On Wednesdays and Fridays, both locations have gigantic sashimi platters on sale for $25, but make sure you call ahead. Luckily for us, they don’t ask you what you plan to do with the fish.
Of course, in order to make this even remotely palatable, we would have to use something other than fruity Jell-O.
So we decided to make soy sauce-flavored gelatin, as you do.
Next, because making a whole cake would have been not only a pain in the ass but also a huge waste if the whole thing sucked balls, Dennis picked up a package of small premade Japanese cakes, also from Joong Boo.
Actually, most of these ingredients were from Joong Boo, except for the soy sauce, which came from the stash of packets we’ve been hoarding from like two years’ worth of takeout orders. Congratulations to us, we’re now successful doomsday preppers!
I poked the holes using a chopstick and tried to space them as evenly as possible.
Next, I poured the hot gelatin mixture over the cakes.
After the fact, I reread a poke cake recipe and discovered I was only supposed to pour the gelatin into the holes, and not over the whole damn thing, but the Lord forgives.
We stuck it in the fridge to let the gelatin do its thing.
After a few hours, we removed the cakes from the refrigerator.
As they were almost fully saturated with soy sauce, they turned mostly brown.
Dennis said, “They look like White Castle slider patties!”
We needed some sort of frosting, and Cool Whip probably wouldn’t give the most authentic poke flavor, so Dennis blended some edamame, avocado, and wasabi.
He ended up having to add a bit of water to get the right consistency, as the skin on the soybeans proved difficult to blend and the avocado we used wasn’t quite ripe enough. It also didn’t help that he was using his gigantic Ninja blender, which he considers his arch nemesis because it’s clunky and sort of sucks and he needs to sit on my shoulders to use it.
For some reason, Dennis took it upon himself to helm the frosting process.
As you can see here, he was clearly the most qualified for the job. I asked him how the frosting tasted and he replied, “Dunno, haven’t tried it yet,” and continued to smear it on the cake.
We chose to layer the small cakes.
So as not to overwhelm it with toppings, Dennis slipped a few ingredients between the layers, starting with dried seaweed, cucumber, and green onion, which he lovingly chopped for me because I need both of my hands.
On top of those, he added a few slices of tai (red sea bream), because it’s our least favorite of the fish on the platter and once we topped it with the second layer of cake we would forget it was there.
After the top layer was added, the whole thing ended up looking more like a sandwich than a cake, but Dennis fixed that by gently caressing it with a flawlessly smooth, even layer of frosting.
When this is all over, he should really open his own patisserie. I would go there.
Once.
We topped the cake with more fish: salmon, tuna, and fluke.
With my patently unsteady caffeine-hands, I drizzled it with a mixture of japanese mayo and chili-vinegar sauce and then sprinkled it elegantly with more green onion and furikake. Eat my ass, Salt Bae.
Did I mention it’s my birthday today?
Dennis chose to accent the cake with candles recycled from his birthday last month. I suspect this was less in celebration of me and more in celebration of “Haha look, it’s the sex number!!!”
Finally, the taste test.
I was prepared to hate it, and in fact stared at my forkful with the apprehension I usually reserve for shots of Malort. But I took the plunge, and it tasted…
Weird.
Then I took another bite, opened my heart, and actually thought about it. It really wasn’t that bad! The only thing that didn’t work was the cake itself, which was insanely sweet. Otherwise, it pretty much just tasted like a poké bowl. The soy sauce flavor didn’t really come through in the cake, probably because we had to dilute it to make the gelatin, but I didn’t really mind.
Dennis’ flavor journey went in the opposite direction. After his first bite, he said, “Wow! This is pretty good!” and then ate a little more, shook his head, and said, “Yeah, that cake’s fucked up.”
After we had our bites, the whole thing fell apart. As it collapsed into a grotesque mass of ingredients and stopped looking like food, it felt like the end of a Scooby Doo episode, where they discover that the trusted side character was the villain all along. But was the cake the villain? Or were we?
Ruh roh.
Hi, Dannis here.
If you can, wish Davida a happy birthday. As usual, I highly recommend sharing the love with people you dislike very much.
And as always, thank you, paid subscribers. You’re keeping the site alive, and well, frankly, you’re keeping us alive too.
Venmo: @dickholedannis
We love you all, and we’ll visit your email inbox as usual, next week.
Oh, one last thing!
This photo I took years ago of a sausage monster coming out of an Italian beef bloody mary ended up on the Graham Norton Show in the UK. Holy shit!
okay now bye for real
Oh, Mandy, you came and you gave without taking...
Happy Birthday Davida! 🎂🎂🎂