2015: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors

In summer 2015, I finally finished Zero Escape Volume 2: Virtue's Last Reward, and hype had been building in the Zero Escape fandom around un-cancelling volume 3 (which finally happened later that summer). In honor of the Zero Escape hype, I decided to make my birthday dessert project a nod to Volume 1: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors.

Far being it from me to make one of these easier for myself, I decided to make 3 desserts, each inspired by the number [9] bracelet from 999—the bracelets in 999 each had a red plastic enclosure with a black face and a light blue 7-segment display. For the first one, I made a blackberry pie, with freeze-dried strawberries ground into a powder and worked into the pie crust to give it a bright red color, and the [9] being cut out of pie crust and colored with food coloring. For the second, dark chocolate fudge with a hole cut out for the [9] and filled with blue Jell-O. And for the third, the outside of a round strawberry cake filled with a circle of brownie, and white chocolate melted, mixed with food coloring, and shaped into the [9].

In so far as these dessert projects have “rules”, this one broke the most of them—the greatest use of just straight, undisguised, added food coloring (though there is not really a natural source of bright blue), and the only one of only two to use actual cake. Also, if I were to do it again, I would probably fill the [9] hole in the middle one with some white chocolate fudge to make the blue Jell-O show up more vividly. (I could obviously also just dye some white chocolate fudge blue, but part of these projects is mashing up different desserts, so I appreciate that past!me did not make the middle one exclusively fudge.)