The Room on Cake is a periodic series in which I attempt to trick myself into learning cake decorating techniques by designing, baking, and decorating cakes based on quotes from The Room, my favorite bad movie. Like this series? Buy me a Ko-Fi or support me on Patreon!

This gold and cash-dollar green watercolor cake is to celebrate someone getting a raise!

In this scene, Denny is confronted by the improbably named Chris-R, who demands payment for the drugs Denny bought from him. “Where’s my money, Denny? Where’s my fucking money, Denny?” he repeats, threatening Denny with a gun. Denny asks him for more time, which enrages Chris-R. Then, even more improbably, Johnny and Mark burst onto the scene, disarm Chris-R, and take him “to the police.” According to Greg Sestero, Dan Janjigian’s performance as Chris-R is one of the best in the film (The Disaster Artist, loc. 95), and the whole scene also boasts some of the best/worst lines. (I mean, so does every scene.) “Where’s my fucking money, Denny?”, “I don’t have five fucking minutes!”, “What kind of drugs, Denny?!”, and “That is a dangerous man!” are all classics. (Script from The Room here.)

For the cake design, I wanted to incorporate some Kanazawa gold-leaf (kinpaku, 金箔) a friend of mine brought back for me from a trip since I haven’t managed to get back to Ishikawa since I left. I also wanted to try a watercolor design in frosting for a while, and the Swiss buttercream recipe I’m using (see below) was perfect for it. I did a crumb coat on the cake in white, then refrigerated it for about seven minutes until the frosting had set. While it was setting, I dyed some of the frosting with leaf-green and some with golden yellow. I dabbed the colors and some extra white frosting onto the cake, then used a bench scraper and my rotating cake stand to smooth them into this watercolor design. After I piped the words, I sprinkled the top with gold leaf.

I had originally wanted to make the “Magically Moist Almond Cake” from Bob’s Red Mill. Because it’s made of almond and coconut flour, the cake has fewer lower carbs and grains than regular cake, which is more in line with Robin’s dietary restrictions. However, despite looking like a regular cake in the picture, mine fell apart when unmolding because it got stuck to the parchment paper on the way out. So I used the extra green frosting to frost it, and brought it along for people to try. It’s really good—I just need to work on getting it out of the container. The cake I actually decorated was Ia second cake I made the morning of the party: the “Eight Yolk Golden Cake” from The Joy of Cooking, since I needed a bunch of egg whites for the Swiss Buttercream frosting.

By the way, I got a cool new commercially compostable parchment paper!! I love it. This is not an ad.

• Cake: “Eight-Yolk Gold Cake” from The Joy of Cooking, 2006 ed., p. 715.
• Frosting: “Swiss Buttercream,” Sprinklebakes, p. 73
• Curd: “Blackberry Curd,” Sprinklebakes, p. 193
• Food coloring: Wilton Gel Icing Colors
• Tips: Ateco #16 star tip and #4 writing tip
• Edible gold leaf: from Kanazawa
• Techniques: watercolor frosting (Styles Sweet CA), gold leaf decoration
• Attempted: gluten-free cake with “traditional” frosting