Vegetablecake

fruitcake needed a vacation

Hi, clowns!

Well, we’re pretty much at the end of the year. I know, I can’t believe it either. Jesus fuck. It’s been a pretty wild one.

Speaking of wild, a piece I wrote for Bon Appétit dropped last week (it’s about my favorite hot dogs in Chicago!). I have a lot of reasons to be proud of it, especially considering that reading Bon Appétit was one of the reasons why I got into food writing in the first place.

But really, my crowning achievement was that their social media person tagged my handle on Instagram.

The act of being tagged isn’t particularly notable; some outlets are perfectly happy to mention you as an author when they share new pieces on social media. But the fact that an account that has 4.5 million followers tagged mine, is funnier than I could have ever imagined.

Computer, enhance.

Guys.

My fucking Instagram handle is @dickholedannis. Bon Appétit mentioning me as “local expert” @dickholedannis, was one of the best things that has happened to me this year. (Runner up was when a publication in Seattle accidentally referred to me as @farttaco on Twitter. I’m actually @fartsandwich.)

I am pretty sure I have not stopped laughing since it happened. God, my face hurts. I’m just picturing people scrolling through Instagram, seeing the post about the piece, then scrunching up their faces when they read what my username is. Congratulations to me.

What’s even better is that people in the comments to the post are pretty much calling me an idiot for not including their personal favorite hot dog stands, but considering their ire is directed at a guy who goes by @dickholedannis, joke’s on them.

Anyway.

Davida and I were in the car, in the middle of Christmas shopping the other day, when I confessed to her that I was having trouble coming up with an idea for this week. I mentioned the fact that I hadn’t written any holiday-related stuff yet, so she just started rattling ideas off.

“What about something having to do with fruitcake?” We sat in silence for a few minutes as I drove. She started muttering beneath her breath.

Then she said, absentmindedly, “Wait. How about vegetablecake?”

For a second, I didn’t quite understand what she meant. Then I realized that she’d pronounced it all in one go. “Vegetablecake.” Like fruitcake, only with…vegetables. Anyway, she has a James Beard Award now for her lifetime achievement.

I always did suspect that fruitcake wasn’t an only child.

After we looked up recipes for actual fruitcake, it occurred to me that it’s not particularly what I’d describe as a novice baker’s recipe. This version from King Arthur Baking Company has 20 ingredients in it (I counted), which is sort of fucked. So I did the genius thing and searched for “fruitcake box mix” and to my delight, food blog Let’s Dish delivered with a recipe, using spice cake box mix.

I didn’t even know boxed spice cake mix even existed. I guess I shouldn’t be particularly surprised, since there’s probably boxed cake mix for every single variety. Can’t wait to try urinal cake mix someday,

Okay, so the cake base was settled upon, but what about the vegetables?

The fruit in fruitcake is that jerky-like shit like dried apricots, dates, raisins, and cherries. I couldn’t think of an analog to those ingredients when it came to veggies, until I remembered something.

Have you ever seen those soup kits with freeze-dried vegetables in them? They come in plastic packages and are a mix of veggies and seasoning, ready to rehydrate with some stock.

They’re like the trail mix of veggies, and technically since everything’s freeze dried, you can theoretically just eat each component as-is.

So why not just dump one of those packages right into some spice cake mix?

I prepared the box mix as instructed with three eggs and a half cup of vegetable oil, then folded an entire bag of that weird freeze-dried soup mix (this one was tortilla soup base) right into the batter.

I was concerned that it’d end up being too salty, but fortunately, salt wasn’t even one of the ingredients to this soup mix. Ah yes, the blander the better. Flavor is the enemy to classic comfort food dishes, as many of you pointed out in that absolutely amazing comment thread the other week.

Davida suggested I toss in some nuts too, just for the hell of it.

We didn’t want to mess with tradition too much, you know? People might get mad at me.

I finally had a reason to use the old-ass Bundt pan in my cabinet.

We’d only used it once for the olive wreath mold piece that Davida wrote about last year. The shape would add some style, elegance, and basically make the cake look like my favorite shape in the world, that of a bunghole.

After baking for 40 minutes, yes, the vegetablecake came out indeed looking like a perfectly browned anus.

The scent from this anus was giving me extraordinarily conflicting feelings, however. As it baked, the apartment smelled, as Davida put it, “like Christmas.” But as time passed, it transformed from that nutmeg, clove, and allspice scent into stew territory. It was very bizarre, but not surprising, considering dinner and dessert were pretty much cooked in the same vessel.

I’d had this theory that the moisture would have been sucked into the vegetables rendering the cake dry and rehydrating the veggies, but I was immediately proven wrong.

After I bit into the thing I immediately thought I’d broken all of my teeth. Thankfully it was just a freeze-dried black bean, because holy shit, explaining that to my dentist would have been a real good time.

Davida came over to try some, and after her first bite, she did something wholly unexpected. She started giggling.

“I can taste the Southwest,” she said, laughing through bites of the cake. Davida’s been subjected to so much culinary hell thanks to this newsletter that seeing her laugh about my cooking caught me off guard. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I am @dickholedannis, after all.

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Vegetablecake. As a holiday gift to yours truly, don’t forget to share the newsletter any way possible, via the collapsing structure of social media, by forwarding it to your friends, or by printing it out and mailing it to your uncle:

And don’t forget to upgrade to a paid subscription! You’ll get exclusive editions of the newsletter almost every week, which includes things like really stupid recipes, continued experiments, and more. Consider it a gift to yourself, you deserve it.

Plus, once you sign up, you have full run of the archives at foodisstupid.substack.com, so you won’t have missed out on over three years worth of clowning around.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this up until now, which is dumb of me: If you have been putting off Christmas shopping, you can gift someone a subscription to the newsletter. This gift will indicate that you either love this person or you hate them.

And finally, this is the second-to-last edition of the newsletter for this year. That sounds ominous, but what that means is that one more’s coming until I take a break for the holiday.

I’ve got one word for you: meatcake.

As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into your inboxes soon. Happy holidays, clowns!