We Made the Portal Cake: No Lie, It's Delicious

By
Stella Parks
Stella Parks
Editor Emeritus
Stella Parks is a CIA-trained baking nerd and pastry wizard, dubbed one of America's Best New Pastry Chefs by Food & Wine. She was the pastry editor at Serious Eats from 2016 to 2019.
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Updated August 10, 2018
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Cake and grief counseling will be available at the end of this article. . Vicky Wasik

In the realm of gaming, there is perhaps no cake more famous than the one promised to Chell in Portal. Served with a side of grief counseling, it initially represented hope; hope that perhaps the maliciously sarcastic Artificial Intelligence known as GLaDOS had come to feel a scrap of affection for one plucky test subject after all. But, like a dental filling through the Material Emancipation Grill, that hope was soon stripped away.

In a room where the word "help" was scrawled across the floor in blood, another message was written on the wall: the cake is a lie.

For those of us who've played, the phrase might as well have been etched across the backs of our eyelids. It's been repeated like a mantra, circulated like a meme, celebrated like a rite of passage, but in the end, the cake was never a lie. That would have been too easy, too cheap.

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Knowing GLaDOS, her pathological vindictiveness and petty humor, I'm certain that no small part of her satisfaction in baiting the player came from the fact that she was actively withholding a real cake. In so doing, GLaDOS would subvert the player's certainty that the cake was a lie and thus gain another victory in her psychological war.

To that end, not only can a determined player plumb the depths of Aperture Science to discover a real cake bathed in the glow of a single candle, it's possible to force GLaDOS to recite her own recipe—who else would lace a cake with volatile malted-milk impoundments?

Leaving aside any deadly, nonsensical, or otherwise unsavory components, I've been able to take the official ingredients given in-game and reverse-engineer a recipe in full. Forgetting the polyester resin, GLaDOS calls for one cup semisweet chocolate chips, three-quarters of a cup of butter, one and two-thirds cup granulated sugar, nine egg yolks, and two cups of all-purpose flour.

Without any instructions aside from an entry on how to kill someone with your bare hands, I was able to deduce from the ratio of ingredients (and lack of leavening agents) that the Portal Cake is, in fact, a chocolate chiffon. The chocolate and butter would be melted together, the egg yolks and sugar foamed; then the chocolate-butter would be drizzled in and the flour folded in last.

Given that the cake is little more than an elaborate Easter egg, I was surprised at how well it translates to the real world. Thanks to the emulsifying power of yolks, it's a relatively stable foam, making the recipe accessible even to beginners and producing a cake that's custardy-rich, with a sweet cocoa flavor reminiscent of German chocolate.

Which is perfectly in line with the official filling: a can of prepared coconut-pecan frosting enriched with whole eggs. To that, I can only raise my middle finger to GLaDOS and make something similar, with a custard of condensed milk, eggs, coconut, and pecan. Of course, what's inside hardly matters if the outer appearance isn't spot-on.

According to GLaDOS's recipe, the large, irregular chunks that encrust the cake are likely "sediment-shaped sediment," which I've taken the liberty of replacing with milk chocolate ground in a food processor. It's finished with a few swirls of whipped cream and Marasca cherries, which have a tart flavor and boozy bite that help to offset the sweetness of the chocolate.

In bringing the Portal Cake to life, based on the actual recipe given in-game, it's my turn to take perverse satisfaction in conquering one final test, one that no one but a pastry chef could have puzzled out. Make no mistake, this was a triumph. "Anyway," as GLaDOS would say, "this cake is great. It's so delicious and moist."

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