Imagine my surprise that there is actually a type of cake called fairy cake, which appears to be just a sponge cupcake. Sponge cake is OK, but I never make it, preferring to make lighter chiffon cakes-- cakier than angel food but lighter than the fairy cake recipe.
I don’t know how many people remember the fad book Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book from some years ago, but I thought a picture of one of the pressed fairies might be in order here (CW: nudity, green gore):
I definitely have a sense of both games now. One a fantasy, the other appearing more sci-fi oriented. Vanilla and chocolate. It remains to be seen what other flavors will be added. Both heavily featuring the device, it appears. I wondered before we started how central the secret ingredient would be in the resulting games, and this ingredient almost commands a specific type of game. In future episodes, I’d like to see ingredients that can be interpreted more broadly.
In our top secret elite judges’ room, I was asked to talk about fairy tales a bit as I’m a fairy tale buff. Putting a fairy in a story does not a fairy tale make. IF is well-suited to fairy tales because of the natural quest element in much IF, and the fantasy-heavy history of IF, full of good vs. evil. But if either of our contestants want to make a bona fide fairy tale, there needs to be a heavy-handed morality lesson involved, and it should lean at least partway into actual folklore territory instead of being purely creative fantasy. Or, y’know, it could just be a game about a fairy, an interdimensional spider, and a thingamajig without having to fulfill some academic genre checklist.