Gourmet Gamer Girl sets forth into The Fog to make Survivor Pudding!

Killing, Surviving, Baking, & Dead by Daylight

Camping, tunneling, slugging, t-bagging, flashlight clicking, BM-galore, and more!

If absolutely none of these of these words make any sense to you, chances are you've never played a match of the hit asymmetrical horror game, Dead by Daylight. Originally released in 2016, Dead by Daylight has sort of become a beloved guilty pleasure for many- filled with hours of endless fun and a roster of the most colorful characters you'll ever see from across all different kinds of horror- both licensed and original to the game itself.

I'm serious here, reader! There is no other game where you can run around the Raccoon City Police Department from the Resident Evil games, while playing as Steve Harrington from Stranger Things getting chased by Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with your teammates being Ash Williams from Evil Dead, Detective David Tapp from Saw, and Laurie Strode from Halloween. It's somehow both wacky and wild in the craziest way possible- but it works because it's so much fun to play.

The game is comprised of five players: four survivors versus one killer. The survivors' goal is to do five of seven generators plopped around the map so that they can power exit gates and escape. The killer's job? Eliminate all four survivors before they can do that by any means possible. It's a constant back and forth over who can do their job and win the match!

Licenses aside, Dead by Daylight also has some of the most diverse and imaginative characters I've ever seen. I mean, we have a K-pop singer who throws knives and tortures people as a killer alongside a Babylonian priestess who vomits on people. If that's not creative- I don't know what is.

I could spend hours talking about Dead by Daylight. It is my favorite game and has been since I started playing in November of 2018! I remember renting my copy of the game from my local library on a cold November afternoon because I'd heard great things about it and wanted to try it out. Weird, right? Renting a game from your library?

Well, I've been hooked ever since. There's nothing quite like the fear instilled on you seeing Michael Myers pop out from behind a corner while he chases you with his huge butcher knife. Those first few hours are the scariest time you'll ever have playing the game- and now with over a thousand in the game alone, I kind of miss the days when I used to hide in lockers and crouch in bushes to avoid the gaze of the killer I heard coming up behind me. Now it's all just running around pieces of wood until my teammates can do generators- but that's a story for a different day.

I love horror- much as you know. Dead by Daylight is my favorite kind of horror game because it's something new and different every match. The killers and survivors are always shifting and leading to new fears, fun, and frights as I go from one match to the next. Whether I'm running around as a survivor or doing my best to eliminate the competition as killer, Dead by Daylight has a special place in my heart- and that's why I wanted to cook something from it to be my Spooktacular Halloween Special. Happy belated Halloween, by the way, dear reader! This may not be released until after, but I did make this dish on Halloween for the most spooky dessert making time I could have! :)

Now, you may be wondering- what could she possibly have to make from an asymmetrical horror game? I'm sure you've figured out by now that there isn't a ton of cooking in Dead by Daylight. Not much time to do it when you're running from the killer, after all. Despite the presence of multiple cannibalistic killers, I choose to make something a bit less fleshy that was heavily inspired by a dish present in the game.

In Dead by Daylight, both killers and survivors receive "bloodpoints" from the match that they can use to level up their characters. Both sides have offerings they can bring that give you more points at the end of each match. Survivors can bring an "escape cake" and killers can bring a "survivor pudding"- both of which double bloodpoint gains after a match is over. It was from these offerings that I gained the inspiration to craft a dish from Dead by Daylight. As interesting as an escape cake sounded, I went with a survivor pudding since it has a bit more flair and sounded a tad more interesting.

So, without further ado- a gamer girl who knows how to bake tries her hand at crafting a delicious survivor pudding- only with 100 percent less body parts than it's in game counterpart. I'll try my best not to get killed by a cannibalistic monster while I make it.

I'd prefer not ending up in the fog as the next survivor until the end of time, after all. I'm not very good at repairing generators! ;)

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The Gourmet Gamer Girl's Guide to Baking Survivor Pudding

So... we're back to baking this week- yay! After all it's a survivor pudding, isn't it? Science, baby! Well, do not fret dear reader- despite the fact that this is a baking week, I don't really have a recipe to follow for this delicious treat. Unfortunately for me, unlike the sweet rolls I made from Skyrim, there isn't really an official Dead by Daylight cookbook (yet). That means that I really have nothing to go off of, so it was my turn to do my best at making a baked treat with no recipe and no direction other than my baking skills. Crafting a baked good with no recipe? Scandalous, I know!

So.. survivor pudding. What do we know about it? Not a whole lot to be completely honest. Much like the sarmale we made last time, I don't have a ton of direction. But, unlike the sarmale I made last time, it isn't an actual dish- which means about 95% of the work for it can be left to the imagination. It can be pretty much anything we want it to be as long as it fills two characteristics.

First, it's called survivor pudding. Thus, this dish is pudding based- so, we're making something pudding adjacent obviously! Second, the line of dialogue indicating what a survivor pudding is says that it happens to be, "a heavily salted pudding". So, we're making salty pudding. 

Now, that sounds gross- and I'll agree with you on this one. So, if we need to make a salty pudding dish, let's do it right- and make it taste halfway decent! My best guess for the game's version of survivor pudding is that it's probably made out of actual survivors. That doesn't sound good, so I think I may take my own direction here.

Salty desserts. Interesting idea, huh? Well, sweet and salty go well together so how about we try our hand at making a salted caramel pudding, eh? Now salted caramel pudding by itself sounds kind of boring- at least to me. So, we need to find a way to spice it up obviously, and try to fit in with the spooky fall theme too!

This so happens to be the in-game icon for survivor pudding. We can see some fingers and eyeballs in it- so we'll roll with it. The first thing I thought of to play on the fingers happened to be ladyfingers (a type of cookie often used in tiramisu). So, salted caramel pudding with some ladyfingers. Slightly more interesting than just salted caramel pudding alone, no?

Unfortunately, the limits of my creativity were stretched thin for coming up with an eyeball replacement. Nothing came to mind. So, nevertheless, I decided to make this something inspired by survivor pudding, and I put my own spin on it. Mine turned out a bit more like a trifle- but we'll touch on that tidbit of information again in a few. Let's get baking, shall we?

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The Baking Process

The concept of survivor pudding is really only limited by my own creativity. Thus, my pudding ended up a bit more like a trifle since I wanted to put my own pizzaz on it! A trifle is essentially a layered dessert- usually some kind of cake/cookie topped with custard, whipped cream, and sometimes fruit. Pudding is a loose term for what I made- since it was pudding based, but wasn't just a bowl of pudding. Since I knew I wanted to use ladyfingers, I decided structuring this more like a trifle seemed like the smartest move. Layers of salted caramel pudding with layers of "fingers" in between.

Side note- pudding is often used as a general term for "dessert" in some areas of England, so making a trifle and calling it a pudding seems fair to me. ;)

If you don't know anything about ladyfingers (maybe you've never had one before, or maybe you've never enjoyed tiramisu before either- who am I to judge?), they are essentially a long hard cookie. Sort of cylindrical, shaped similar to a finger. Great for making dishes with custard or other liquids, because the cookie will soak up the liquid and become soft while still retaining it's own structure. Essentially? Good cookie for making a no-bake, cake-like dish that you don't want to turn to mush in the fridge. Hence why it's often used for tiramisu!

So, ladyfingers are hard. They need time to soften up in the fridge to make the dish have the correct texture. But, that also means that we're losing out on any sort of texture once this pudding goes in the fridge. Soft ladyfingers and creamy pudding- but we've got no crunch. That sounded boring and texture-less. So, since this is my version of survivor pudding, I decided I wanted a crunchy textural element that would hold up in the fridge.

I decided to roll with a crumble. Since this is a dish themed after all things spooky and fall-adjacent, I decided to roll with a simple pecan crumble to sprinkle in between and on top of my layers for some added texture in my pudding. That is where we are going to begin this recipe's culinary journey, dear reader.

Crumbles are pretty simple. You can usually find them on top of pies or crisps- and they're super easy to make. We start with preheating the oven to 350 degrees for this one.

Next, I prepared a cookie sheet for baking my crumble by putting a silicone mat on it. I like silicone mats because I find them easy to clean when cooking (or baking) gets a little bit messy, or has a chance of sticking (or carmelizing) to the cookie sheet. You could probably also use parchment paper, but I think these are easier to work with- and honestly a lot less hassle. Parchment paper is always rolling back up on me when I put it on my cookie sheet. That's annoying to deal with- sorry.

Next comes actually putting together our crumble. Remember- crumbles are simple. Butter, flour, brown sugar, salt, and maybe some kind of nut if you're feeling a little spicy. You can spice them up more if you've got cinnamon or nutmeg laying around- but I didn't think this recipe needed it. I just wanted a simple textural element. The salted caramel needed to be the star, ya know?

I cut up six tablespoons of salted butter for my crumble. I usually roll with unsalted butter when I cook something that needs it, but I had salted on hand for my caramel so I rolled with what I had. There's not a huge difference, so it's no big deal for something like this. I just cut it up into small cubes and threw it in my bowl!

After that, I added one cup of regular all purpose flour, one cup of brown sugar, and a few sprinkles of regular table salt to my bowl with the butter. Then, we mixed!

I thought about using a food processor for this part, but my food processor is in my basement (since I don't use it super often), and I didn't feel like pulsing my mixture a few times warranted pulling out an entire food processor when I had a perfectly good pastry cutter on hand already.

Pastry cutters are a wonderful thing, and they are great for mixing things like crumble or pie crusts. See, I cut up my butter into cubes because I wanted flecks of it throughout my crumble. I didn't want it to perfectly mix into all my other ingredients- I wanted something a bit more chunky and clunkily mixed- just the way a crumble should be.

Here's the crumble after I mixed it a few times with my pastry cutter. You can still see some chunks of butter despite the fact that it's all nice and mixed up. This texture is perfect for what I needed, but it wasn't quite done yet.

For some extra crunch, I wanted to add some pecans. I just emptied out my package onto the cutting board I used to slice my butter into tiny chunks, and I gave them a rough chop. I didn't want them super small, and uniformity didn't really matter for a dish like this. Some bigger chunks and smaller chunks would work just fine! I just threw them in with my mixture when I was finished.

After this, I just mixed my nuts into the rest of the crumble by hand. Using a pastry cutter would be hard at this point, since the nuts were likely to just get stuck in it, so I just tossed with my hands and used my fingers to form some bigger and smaller chunks of the flour/butter/brown sugar mix so I had a variety of pieces with different sizes.

Now, usually when you make a crumble you bake it on top of something- like a pie, or maybe some apples if you're making a crisp. Survivor pudding doesn't really get baked, so I just baked my crumble separately and hoped for the best. It's all you can ever do!

I spread it as evenly as I could on a cookie sheet and threw it in the oven for about fifteen minutes. I was planning to pull it out when the flour turned golden and the entire thing started to crisp slightly. Under-cooked flour is both dangerous (salmonella) and tastes nasty. I'd pretty much know it was done when the flour started to smell a bit nutty!

While this was working, I shifted to making my salted caramel so it would have time to cool while I made the pudding. Much like any caramel you'd make, I started with one cup of sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat. From here, it's pretty simple- you let your sugar turn brown and start to melt. Also, my oven was a little messy from cooking earlier and making the crumble- but I cleaned that up later! :)

It's really easy to give yourself third-degree burns with molten hot sugar- so I apologize for the quality of the pictures of the caramel going forward. It isn't easy stirring with one hand and taking pictures with the other, ya know?

Once my sugar was completely melted, I moved it off the burner and stirred in 6 tablespoons of salted butter and a few sprinkles of normal table salt. Same flavor profile as the crumble to really round out the recipe!

After this, I moved it back to a lower heat, and let this cook down for a few seconds. Then I stirred in one cup of room-temperature heavy whipping cream (since I didn't want it to curdle while I was mixing!) From the point the sugar melted to the point where I added the heavy cream, I never stopped stirring. The sugar tended to bubble up quickly, so stirring constantly was super important as to not burn myself horribly.

Here are the caramel and the crumble all nice and done since they finished around the same time! Right after I finished my caramel and put it on the back burner, I was able to pull out the crumble since it was beautiful, nutty, and golden! I let both cool on my stove while I made my pudding and let it set.

Now, the pudding. I went back and forth for a long while on whether or not I wanted to make a homemade pudding or not. Pudding isn't exactly the easiest thing to make from scratch if I'm being perfectly honest. It's fairly... temperamental, to put it lightly. That means I would need to follow a recipe- and honestly? I felt like following a recipe for the pudding was kind of cheating in a way. Like I was taking something that belonged to someone else, adding a few parts that were my own, and calling it mine. It didn't feel right to follow a recipe for half this, and then do my own thing for the other part. I'm completely alright to follow a recipe and report on it, but doing half a recipe and then half my own thing would be confusing to say the least. Since there is no recipe for survivor pudding, I wanted this to be mine. Not a recipe I followed, put a slight spin on, and called something different.

So, I just bought instant pudding. Yes, I know- it's not the most exciting thing. Is it lazy? Sure. However, I just want to tell you that cooking (or baking) doesn't need to always be everything from scratch. Don't ever let someone make you feel bad for jazzing up something you bought from the store, dear reader. It's perfectly alright to put that store-bought pasta sauce on the homemade pizza. 

Cooking (and baking!) are supposed to be fun. And this recipe was supposed to be a fun way for me to put a spin on my version of a survivor pudding. So, yes- I am using white chocolate Jello pudding mix. I wanted caramel, but unfortunately I couldn't find any caramel pudding mix at the store. Oh well- we'll work through it. Cooking is one part following a plan, and another part making it up as you go when the plan doesn't go perfectly!

I put my pudding mix in a bowl and simply followed the directions to make it correctly. The correct measurements were 2 cups of cold milk per packet- so I measured out four cups of milk since I was using two packets. From there, we just dump in the milk, mix for a few minutes, and let it set on the counter for five minutes until it firms up into actual pudding and not soup. 

While this was sitting, I opened my ladyfingers and got them all prepped for layering. So, I literally just opened the plastic and set them on my counter. No- I'm not making homemade ladyfingers. I don't even make homemade ladyfingers when I spend multiple hours making tiramisu. I don't know anyone who makes homemade ladyfingers. That sounds like a lot of work, and this dessert was just supposed to be a simple Halloween treat. Plus, if I wasn't following a recipe for the pudding- why would I follow a recipe for ladyfingers? This is my recipe, remember? And I say that when you can take a lazy shortcut here or there, you should definitely do it. I won't tell, I promise! :)

Here's what the pudding looked like after the five minute wait time! Super easy to make and perfect consistency. I use instant pudding all the time when I make icebox cakes, or really anything that requires a pudding base- so this turned out about as well as could be expected- at least in my humble experience. 

Next, I spooned in some of my salted caramel. This was supposed to be a salted caramel pudding, remember dear reader? Now it's a salted caramel, white chocolate pudding- but tomato, tomato. The salted caramel was all you'd really taste anyways. The pudding packet was just a way to make a simple base!

I stirred that together, and voila- salted caramel pudding! Nice, easy, and simple. Perfect for trifle assembly- which is where we happen to be headed next!

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The Layering Process

Now we get to the proverbial bread and butter of the survivor pudding process- actually assembling it! Compared to some other layered trifles I've made before, this one was really easy and simple to do. All you need is a trifle dish (or honestly, a simple 9" by 13" pan would work too, if you wanted to roll that way). We're simply layering and stacking our different ingredients until we either A) run out, or B) reach the top of the dish!

First, we started with a very thin layer of the pudding on the bottom so that the bottom layer of ladyfingers have something to hold onto while we assemble. Nothing is more annoying when making a trifle or another stacked dessert than when your base is moving around because it has no glue. Remember when we made sarmale and sauced the bottom of the pan? Same idea here.

Next up we put a few ladyfingers on our pudding layer. My dish was a bit smaller than I thought, so I ended up having to layer them a bit weird. Sometimes you just have to break the cookies to get a piece in every cranny. No biggie- we just break a few into pieces and keep moving!

Now comes a layer of pudding spread evenly over the top of the ladyfingers. I smoothed it out as best as I could with a spoon. If it isn't perfect, that's alright. It'll be fine once it settles in the fridge!

After the pudding, I drizzled a thin layer of my salted caramel over the top of it and then sprinkled my crumble on top of that. Super simple and easy- this was essentially the entirety of the layering process. Honestly? Much, much easier and faster than rolling the sarmale was a few weeks ago. Compared to other trifles I've made, the layering was also a lot less labor intensive too!

Here it is, all nice and done. I did three complete layers (pudding, ladyfingers, caramel, and crumble) before I ran out of pudding and called it. I topped with the remainder of my crumble and set it in the fridge to chill and settle. Survivor pudding done and dusted- now the real question remains: how did it taste?!

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The Gourmet Gamer Girl Verdict

Now, now- how was it? Was it delicious, delightful, and terrifyingly frightful? Well, there's something you gotta know about no-bake items with hard cookies that need time to chill in the fridge- they need time to settle. Often times, they'll taste much better on day two in the fridge than they will on day one. The cookies tend not to get to be the right texture until day two! So (just this once) I'll be talking about the pudding on day one AND day two. It's hard to get a correct summation of flavor if I'm not getting the full experience, isn't it?

Excuse the giant black blob in the last picture- that's just my husky! :)

So- the verdict. As always, let's start with the level of easiness in terms of assembly. Was it hard? Not at all! This is probably one of the easiest dessert recipes I've ever made (and I make more no-bake cakes than anything else when I'm in the mood for something sweet!) Using pre-made ladyfingers and instant pudding made this recipe a breeze. In fact, if I was even lazier I'm sure I could have just bought salted caramel sauce in a jar and called it a day. Then again, caramel is super easy to make (as long as you watch it carefully so you don't burn yourself!) Honestly? Less than an hour to make and assemble everything. The longest part of this recipe was just waiting for it to settle in the fridge. So, on our scale of easy peasy to super difficult, I'd say this was pretty easy!

Now the flavor test- was it good? Yes! It was delicious. On day one, the cookies were still a little bit hard so it hadn't quite reached the right texture (or at least the one I was expecting)- but it was still delicious. Day two, however? Not to pat myself on the back, but it rocked on day two. Nice, soft cookies, crunchy topping, and creamy pudding with nice notes of salted caramel. It was the perfect amalgamation of textures! I absolutely loved it- and I'd give it a 10/10 on day two. I will definitely be making this again (and honestly- probably making a bigger batch too!)

I definitely think this is something I'd enjoy after a long day of running around pallets, repairing generators, or sticking a survivor on a rusty meat-hook! Easy to make, not very expensive ingredient wise, and tastes super good! Maybe it's not quite the disgusting, salty, survivor-filled dish that my favorite killers enjoy in Dead by Daylight, but hey- I think I'm a bit of a better cook than Leatherface or his family. ;)

My apologies for the belated Halloween post. I know this is coming out after Halloween, but who's to say that we can't still celebrate spooky season in November? I may be listening to the Christmas tunes as I write this, but I'm still in the spooky spirit! Halloween is less a holiday and more a state of mind, ya know?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some survivors to face camp while I enjoy this delicious pudding! :)

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