Game Kitchen: Cooking Sweetroll From Skyrim In Real Life

Last Sunday, while strolling through my local bookstore, I stumbled upon a neat little book titled "The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook", a cooking guide written by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, a renowned author whose portfolio also includes cookbooks inspired by Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and World of Warcraft.

Being an avid TES fan (don't judge me, Morrowind was the only game my puter could handle back in the day), I quickly bought the tome and, after a quick visit to a grocery store, got home to recreate one of the most iconic dishes associated with the series since the early days of Arena and its character-creation questions – the sweet roll.

Without hesitation, I started mixing and stirring the batter, doing everything quite literally by the book and following the recipe as closely as possible, and everything was going absolutely delightful until the cookbook told me to use five-inch Bundt pans (around 12 centimeters) for actual baking.

"Five inches?" I thought to myself, "I remember them to be much wider!" So I did the only thing a reasonable person would do – booted up the game, baked a sweet roll, and compared its in-game diameter to a rectangular wooden plate, an item I happen to possess IRL:

As you can see, the diameter of the roll is just slightly under the width of the plate, and given that my real-life plate has a width of 24 centimeters (~9.5 inches), I calculated that if I were to stay closer to Skyrim's depiction of the pastry, I needed a Bundt pan around 20-22 centimeters (8-9 inches) in diameter.

Notwithstanding the original recipe, I poured the batter into a bigger 22-centimeter silicone pan, let it rise, prepared the frosting, and baked the cake, only to realize that my hasty decision to use a pan nearly twice the size Monroe-Cassel used ruined not only the cake but my Sunday evening in its entirety, resulting in a bowl of liquid plasma-hot substance with ugly pieces of burnt bland dough floating in it, instead of a delicious roll.

Understanding that giving up then and there would mean postponing the sweet roll until Winter at the earliest, I restocked the fridge and tried again, tweaking the recipe here and there with the goal of getting a delectable cake with a more game-like diameter. Four unsuccessful attempts later, the recipe was finally complete, giving me the idea to share it over here, on 80 Level.

With this short introduction out of the way, I would like to kick off our new series of articles, dedicated to reproducing dishes from various games in real life. Today, as you probably have already guessed, I would like to share with you an easy-to-follow way of baking Skyrim's legendary sweet roll IRL, using a tweaked version of Monroe-Cassel's original recipe as the main reference.

Despite its legendary status, the sweet roll in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is pretty unremarkable, restoring a measly 5 HP and requiring a ridiculous amount of ingredients, compared to other, more useful dishes, if you were to bake one in one of your Hearthfire houses.

Placed on the table in my gorgeous Lakeview Manor, the required ingredients look like this:

However, had the in-game recipe been closer to its real-life counterpart, the ingredients would look a little something like this instead (yes, I used Spawn Ash to depict powdered sugar, Vampire Dust for active dry yeast, and Mammoth Cheese for cream cheese):

1. Combine melted butter and milk in a large bowl, add honey, stir until the honey fully dissolves.

2. Add the salt and yeast, then add the egg and flour.

3. Mix it thoroughly until you have a bowl of smooth batter. 

4. Pour the batter into a pan and leave it for around 30-40 minutes to rise.

5. To create the frosting, combine the softened butter and cream cheese with powdered sugar.

6. Mix them together. Then slowly add heavy cream tablespoon by tablespoon until you get a thick mixture.

7. Half an hour later, put the pan into the oven and preheat it to 140°C (280°F) with the roll already inside. Once the oven has reached said temperature (10-12 minutes on average), bake for 8 minutes. After that, increase the temperature to 170°C (340°F) and bake for 20-25 more minutes. To check whether the roll is ready or not, you can periodically stab it with a toothpick or a wooden chopstick and check whether something sticks to it.

8. When nothing sticks, get the sweet roll out of the oven and let it cool until the pan itself cools, then get it out of the pan and leave it until completely cooled. Once that happens, spoon the icing onto the roll and put it into a fridge for 20-30 minutes for the frosting to harden slightly.

9. (Optional) Put the sweet roll onto a wooden plate and decorate it with forest-themed knick-knacks to create a thumbnail...

...or just put it like you would a sweet roll in the actual game, the choice is yours:

And that's how you bake a 9-inch sweet roll! The most attentive of you have probably already noticed that the original in-game version of the roll is not only wider but also taller, resembling a traditional German and Austrian Gugelhupf cake, while my version is shorter in comparison.

If you, unlike me, would like to go for a 100% thorough 1-to-1 recreation, simply mix up more batter using the aforementioned proportions and bake the roll using the technique described in paragraph 7 of the recipe for 30-35 minutes until the toothpick is dry.

What do you think about the recipe? What would you improve? What other video game recipes would you like to see recreated IRL? Tell us in the comments!

Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.