Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where I swear, you read the title right. Neither you nor I have had a stroke. (At least, no doctor has felt the need to check me for one) Today’s dish(es) come from a weird place, with a funny name, and it’s just going to be easier to explain if we jump right in. For those who’ve already gotten the details and just want the recipe, here’s a link. For those hungering to know more, let’s dig in.

Pandemics make Strange Bedfellows

So, as you may or may not be aware, Valentine ’s Day is coming up. I’ve known for a while, because back in early January, I sketched out what I was going to cover for the first two months of the year, and went “oh, shit, we should do Valentine’s Day again. It’s always a day people are looking for food.” And then I googled “Valentine’s day recipes”, and most of them were for aphrodisiacs, which are perfectly fine, but not something I’m about to serve my mother and brother. However, one caught my eye: “Sex in a Pan”. And I said “sure, why not?” for a variety of reasons. Firstly, “Sex in a Pan” is just a great name. Second, because I was trying to hammer out 2 months of recipes over a 1 hour planning session. Also because, of course, most Valentine’s day food is EXPENSIVE (I saw, with NO IRONY, a suggestion for “Lobster Wellington” as an ‘ideal Valentine’s day dish’. Sure, let’s take Beef Wellington, already one of the more decadent/high-end beef preparations, and replace the beef with fucking LOBSTER), and this looked fairly cheap, but with enough effort, and a cheeky little name that would protect you should your significant other get testy that you didn’t spring for chateaubriand.

“If you’ve got a bougie bae, then it’s a steak day,” as no one says.

I then proceeded to not think about it for 2 or so weeks, until I hopped online, and found myself in a weird place. Because the first recipe I found was NOTHING like the recipe I had read in the first article. And a few more Google searches showed me why: because we’re dealing with a GROUP of recipes, all based around the same themes. And with an amazingly robust, but also simple, etymology.

So it turns out that “Sex in a Pan” is a variant of “Better than Sex Cake”. Which, given that the dish is not a cake, is a weird name. The appellation isn’t uncommon. You could argue it’s in the BIBLE it’s so common. (David, in mourning his friend Jonathan, declares that Jonathan’s love to him was more wonderful than the love of a woman.) Look, people like sex. That’s probably a huge reason Valentine’s Day EXISTS: to give people an excuse to have sex in February, a month lacking in other big holidays. Anywho, so the dish is a sort of trifle or custard pie, with a crust on the bottom, and then layers of pudding and cream cheese and whipped cream. Or at least, “Sex in a Pan” is, because the other thing I found is there is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DISH ALSO named “Better than Sex”, or, and I promise you I’m not making this up: Robert Redford.

His eyes look a little bloodshot here. Wonder what that’s about.

The origin here, as far as I can find, is a cheeky little joke from the 1970’s: see, back then, Robert Redford was a HUNK, and so apparently, someone made some joke about “bringing Robert Redford” to a potluck. Or “the next best thing to Robert Redford” or “Better than Robert Redford”, a progression that I have to inform you means that, at least during the 70’s, Robert Redford was literally a synonym for sex.

And ONE OF THEM is, at least, a cake. Specifically, a poke cake, which I don’t know if I covered before. And I said to myself “Jon, you’ll be coming off a week of making Cubanos, which you KNOW will take HOURS of effort. Which do you want to cover for the post?” To which I said “The fuck if I’m choosing: these dishes should be a piece of cake, and that set-up is too good to pass up.” Which…well, I was at least half-right.

Getting Robert Redford Baked

See what I mean? Worth every minute. With Puns like these, who needs sleep? (Me. Desperately. BUT NOT RIGHT NOW. Well…actually yes, right now, but that’s supposed to be heavy-handed foreshadowing.) Anywho, as a quick aside, to make that amazing pun, I am flipping which dish is called what from the recipes I used, which DOES have precedent, but I do believe to be slightly less likely to be correct...maybe. It’s a big mess, I’ll explain next section. But for now: the set-up for the dish that I’m calling “Robert Redford cake”. As I mentioned, it’s a poke cake. As I didn’t mention, a “poke cake” is, to thoroughly explain the technical details, a cake you poke holes in. That’s it. The idea is you make a cake, poke a bunch of holes in it, and then pour a sauce, syrup, or other flavoring agent over the cake, to be absorbed through the holes.

This is a Strawberry Jello Poke Cake, where they stab a cake with toothpicks, and drizzle jello over it.

Now, supposedly, you can go in any number of directions with this cake, but every recipe I found formed the same basic steps, so I stuck with those. Because that’s going to make it harder for your aunt and grandma to call me a liar, and because the recipe actually bears some resemblance to my family’s brownie trifle recipe, so I figured “stick with something I know they’ll like.” The first step is to make some Devil’s Food Cake, which I did from a box in our pantry that was only 17 months past its expiration date. And…honestly, I don’t know if it had gone bad or not. I’ll explain why in a second, but FIRST, some weird cake and egg facts! See, as noted, I just used a premade cake mix, because I was already making FIVE RECIPES this week, the fuck I needed to add more. (Technically, I made EIGHT recipes over the course of this ONE week, in order to make 3 posts. That is NOT EFFICIENT.)  And a fun fact about instant cake mixes: they’re actually harder to make than they need to be! When they first made boxed cake mix, it ONLY needed water/oil. But people didn’t buy it. So they took out some of the ingredients, and made it so you had to add an egg. Boom. Much more productive. People, somehow, needed a little less instant in their instant cake mix. Speaking of eggs, we’re out of store-bought, and deep into winter, so we’re relying on Blue’s eggs, and she had a bit of an oopsie with this batch.

You want your eggs to have GOOD color, not MULTIPLE colors.

Those are blood spots, which meant that Blue pushed herself a little harder than normal when making this egg. Kind of the chicken equivalent of a subconjunctival hemorrhage, the scary-sounding name for “when one of the blood vessels in your eye pops for no good reason”, like might have happened with Redford earlier! Boom, brought it back. Anyway, it can happen from a simple sneeze, so it’s nothing to be too worried about. When it happens in a chicken egg, if you’re squeamish, you can try and scrape out the little spots, but they won’t be harmful if you leave them in. When working with free-range chickens, you’re going to get weird little hiccups in your eggs sometimes. One of the things that can trigger this is a lack of vitamin D, which, given the last couple weeks of rain and gloom, certainly fits.

Anywho, whether it was the bloody eggs, or the old dust, or it was exactly as it was supposed to be and I just didn’t know, this cake mix was WORRYINGLY thick. Like, I was supposed to spread the mixed bowl out over a greased 9 by 13 pan, and I was struggling to do so, as the batter just clung to the spatula I was using to spread it.  Eventually, I got it spread out, and popped in the oven to bake, where it came out looking perfectly normal.

Perfectly normal, really. Every cake looks like this.

After 10-15 minutes of cooling (to let the cake ‘set up’), you wanna punch a BUNCH of holes into it. Just use the back of a spoon and hammer out row after row of little pockets for our sauce. Which you definitely SHOULD HAVE MADE during the cooling process. The sauce is very complicated, so let me explain: FLAVORED. LIQUID. Again, this is one of those points where “oh you can make it however you want!” So, you know, the sky’s the limit. My version, based on the recipes I found, was a combination of sweetened condensed milk and caramel sauce. Just buy a can/jar of each, stir together, and pour over the cake.

So thick you can’t even see the holes underneath it.

Let the cake sit out for a while to absorb most of the sauce, and then you just top it with…a whole tub of Cool Whip (oh, sorry “frozen whipped topping, thawed”). Very cool, very normal. Now, at this point, NORMALLY you’d pound up some toffee bars and sprinkle over the top, but given the circumstances…

“Hmm, should I start hammering on the counter in the middle of the night?”

I decided that I’d chill it first and sprinkle them on afterward, as some texture. And that’s the Robert Redford. Now, let’s talk about Better than Sex.

Does Sex ‘Taste as Good as Skinny Feels’?

I liked the Redford pun better. DOESN’T MATTER. This recipe, I have to say, was a lot more fiddly than the Redford, and met with a major complication part way through. It’s technically pretty simple, but almost every step had a little bit of frustration through it, mostly because it was late at night, I was making 2 recipes at once, and a couple small errors compounded. But first, let’s hit that detail about why I’m potentially calling these the wrong thing!

Now, as I mentioned, Robert Redford was a hunk, and synonymous with sex, yada yada. All of that is true. What is ALSO true is that, supposedly, Robert Redford stated in some interview decades ago that I cannot find, that his favorite dessert was  “A Lemon Dream”, which some have argued is a variant name of “Lemon Layers”, a dish with a short crust bottom, cream cheese, lemon curd. OTHERS have pointed to “Lemon Dream CAKE” a type of Lemon flavored poke cake. But here’s the thing…I can’t find records for ANY of these dishes that predate the era. The closest I found was Lemon Pudding cake from the 50’s, where, instead of the poke cake set-up, you mixed pudding mix INTO the cake mix for added moisture. So it’s entirely possible that both of these dishes were reverse engineered from the confusion regarding the Robert Redford incident. It’s also entirely possible that all of this is the result of Robert Redford poorly explaining the dessert in said interview: Like, he said “It’s like, a lemon cake with whipped cream, lemon pudding, and cream cheese” you could easily build EITHER version off of that description and think you were doing it right. What makes it even more interesting is that both versions now are much more commonly made with chocolate instead of Lemon, which could give ANOTHER possible explanation: what if the person was just bragging? Like, they made Redford’s Lemon version, and thought “This is nice, but it’d be better with chocolate”, and made “Better than Robert Redford’S Dessert” and THAT got confused with “Better than Sex Cake”? I don’t know, and I’d have to trawl through probably YEARS of old journals, newspapers and stuff to find out, so we don’t have time for that now.

Jesus. Either this rabbit has TERRIBLE subconjunctival hemorrhages…or I guess he’s probably an Albino. That makes more sense. Lot of Red-Eyes today.

So for this recipe, you need to make a bottom crust, which has several variants, but the consistent point I saw was “1/2 cup of butter, 1 cup flour, 1 cup chopped pecans.” Some recipes called for softened butter, some called for melted, and some added sugar. Personally, having made this recipe, I think I’d like to try adding sugar to the crust, because 1: My crust felt VERY skimpy as I pushed it to the edges of the 9 by 13 pan. I really struggled to get it to “cover” the whole thing. And 2: because there was NO visual indication of when this crust was done. It didn’t particularly brown, or set-up, or anything. It just kind of sat in the oven and got hot, and I had no idea if I was doing it right. Sugar would make that process a little more obvious.

I THINK this is before baking, but I legit don’t know.

From there…well, this is where the recipe gets a little annoying. This gets topped with: A cream-cheese, sugar and whipped cream/cool whip, chocolate pudding, vanilla pudding, and more whipped cream/cool whip. Meaning you need to beat together like, 4 different things. Now, if you were making this over, say, the course of a day, it’d be super easy: You pop the crust in, bake it off, take it out, and go handle other stuff as it cools. You come back in, whip up the cream cheese, spread it, wash the bowl, go handle something else. Repeat with next two puddings.

Doing it all at the same time, you’ve got to have at least 4 different vessels (the pan for the dish itself, a bowl each for the puddings, and one for the cream cheese), or you have to keep cleaning the same bowl, adding time.  To make matters WORSE, I made two hiccups in the process. FIRSTLY, I sprung for some higher-end fancy vanilla pudding, and forgot until later that it was “fancy, higher-end vanilla pudding that HAS TO BE BOILED for it to set.” Compared to the chocolate pudding, which I just beat for 2 minutes, let sit for 5, and it was ready, the vanilla pudding had to be stirred CONSTANTLY over medium-low heat until it came to a boil, a process the box CLAIMS takes 6 minutes, but I spent more than 10 minutes doing before I handed the task over to my mother and left.

Mrs O’Guin, you have the conn.

Which you might think means I made this one earlier than the Robert Redford, which would be wrong. What HAPPENED is that I was still making this at 1:30, when my mother woke up (she normally goes to work around 2 AM), and I had to leave, because when I bought the ingredients for both the recipes, I forgot to check the recipes they were MADE OF, and so discovered at 1 in the morning that we didn’t have enough milk in the house to make the puddings. So I had to run to 7/11 and buy some.

So your crust is baked, your puddings are setting up, it’s time for things to get frustrating! Beat together your cream cheese and sugar until fully combined, and then fold in some whipped cream to lighten it. THEN, spread the cream cheese over the crust…which I found to be moderately agonizing. As I noted, the crust made NO effort over its baking time to cohere into a single unit, so trying to spread the thick cream-cheese on it required a very delicate touch: if you spread the mixture one direction, and then tried to smooth the other way, you were far more likely to just peel up chunks of the crust than to get the mixture to move the way you wanted it to.

EVENTUALLY, you succeed. Then you smear a layer of chocolate pudding over the cream cheese, then you smear the fancy vanilla…which turns out to not make nearly as much pudding as the chocolate (which, in retrospect, makes sense: they both started with roughly same amount of milk, and then you brought one to a boil. Of course that one’s going to have less liquid.)

Look at how small it looks. Puny pudding.

Finally, a spread of the remaining half a container of cool whip, and this guy can join his brother in the fridge while you go pass out.

The next day, get that heath bar sprinkle on the Robert Redford (if you want to go all out, you can also drizzle chocolate syrup and/or caramel sauce) and maybe grate some chocolate over the Better than Sex. And take out some chunks to serve.

But which one is which?!

The results were…in my opinion, legitimately impressive. I think I slightly prefer the “Better than Sex”, but I suspect that’s because we used an older box for the Robert Redford. It never FULLY absorbed all the caramel, so for it, it’s good: it’s a chocolate cake with gooey caramel and whipped cream. I just want it a little wetter. My mom similarly preferred the Better than Sex, but she noted that she DID take a corner piece of the Redford, which was drier than the rest of it. Nate was 100% the opposite. His summary was “I like the Robert Redford, the other one is food.”, rating them an 8 out of 10 and a 5 out of 10 respectively. Since they’re both pretty easy, honestly I’d suggest trying them both and figuring out which one you like more (though not at the same time. They’re both BIG. Like, there’s at least 15 decent servings per pan.)

THURSDAY: DID YOU NOT READ HOW MANY THINGS I’VE COOKED? LET A MAN BREATHE FOR A MINUTE, DAMN.

MONDAY: I HAVE A VERY VAGUE PLAN, WHICH REQUIRES THAT I FIND A BOOK I’VE ALREADY SPENT 2 WEEKS HALF-ASSEDLY LOOKING FOR. BUT WE MAY BE GOING TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

Recipes

“Robert Redford”

Makes 12 servings

Ingredients

1 pkg Devil's Food Cake Mix

1 can sweetened condensed milk

1 jar caramel topping

8 oz “frozen whipped topping”, thawed or 8 oz whipped cream.

4 Heath or Skor candy bars, chopped/crushed

Chocolate Syrup/more Caramel for top drizzle (optional)

Preparation

1. Bake cake according to package, using a 9x13 inch pan.  Cool for about 15 minutes. Using the handle of a wooden spoon, poke holes into the cake.

2. Stir together Condensed Milk and Caramel, and pour over cake, allowing to seep into holes. Let cool completely, top with whipped cream, cover, and chill.

3. Take out, and sprinkle over with candy bars. Drizzle with syrup/caramel if desired.

“Better Than Sex”

Makes 12ish servings

Ingredients

                Crust

½ cup butter, softened

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup pecans, chopped

½ cup white sugar (optional)

The Layers

8 oz cream cheese

1 cup powdered sugar

1 large tub whipped topping, or 10 oz whipped cream, separated

1 box chocolate pudding (already made)

1 box vanilla pudding (already made)

Grated chocolate for garnish (optional)

Preparation

1. Beat together the butter, sugar (if using) and flour, for about 2 minutes. Fold in pecans, and spread over  the bottom of a 9 by 13 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, let cool completely.

2. Beat together cream cheese and powdered sugar, about 2 minutes. Fold in half of whipped topping/cream. Spread over crust.

3. Spread chocolate pudding over cream cheese layer, then spread vanilla pudding over chocolate. Top with final layer of remaining half of the whipped cream. Top with grated chocolate, if desired, cover, and refrigerate until service.