Best real-life video-game recipes

Party season is coming on. Want to make it really special? Try some of these fabulous re-creations of video-game food.

Food and drink can be vital in video games: they restore our health, energy and magic; provide skill trees to be explored; and give power-ups and other boosts. They don't do that in real life, mostly (except for maybe the energy thing, since we need food to, you know, live), but they can be absolutely delicious, as a few enquiring kitchen experimenters have revealed.

There are a few places around the web to find re-creations of some of the foods in video games that may or may not have set your mouths to watering. And if these float your geeky gourmand boat, head on over to check out Inn at the Crossroads as well, where two very dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire fans are lovingly reconstructing the dishes from George RR Martin's series.

When is a cake not a cake? When it's a lie! Yeah, that was pretty terrible, but this cake isn't. It's the creation of Daniella Zelli of blog Gourmet Gaming, who has combined her love of pixels with her love of food to mouth-watering effect.

Although Zelli has given the Portal cake a two and a half out of five difficulty, novice chefs can find a simpler recipe on Epicurious.

Find Zelli's Portal cake recipe here, and Gourmet Gaming here.

(Credit: Valve)

Those three words together sound both disturbingly incongruous and completely made up in a video game, and if you were playing Dragon Age, you would be absolutely forgiven for thinking the latter. You would, however, be wrong: the original recipe actually appeared on a 1974 Weight Watchers card.

You can find the recipe for fluffy mackerel pudding here, and other completely strange 1974 Weight Watchers recipe cards here. We will not be held responsible for any experimentation with said recipes.

We love a good burger. We love mushrooms. This burger, however, isn't just made of mushrooms: it's sculpted into one, too. Creator momo made the patty out of mushrooms (and other ingredients), and painted the top of the bun with a green food-dye solution. It looks a little strange, but also delicious.

Find momo's 1-up burger here. Omnivores could probably substitute in actual meat, but we love that it's a mushroom made of mushroom.

And if you've got more of a sweet tooth, why not give Super Mario cupcakes a shot?

When you're adventuring throughout Azeroth with just your skills for survival, you can't be too picky about what ends up in your cooking pot — especially when you're slaying giant spiders. You can relax, though; no actual spiders went into this recipe by Shelbi of The Bronze Kettle, who likes to play around with the recipes found in the cooking profession in Blizzard's MMORPG. Instead she has used crab, which is close, right? It has eight legs, at least.

You can find Shelbi's gooey spider cake recipe here and the rest of their recipes here, including a very tasty-looking dragonsbreath chili.

The sweetroll makes an appearance in a number of Elder Scrolls titles — a sort of pastry or cake drizzled with pale-green icing. This recipe comes from The Geeky Chef, whose forays into geek cookery expand beyond gaming and into books and movies, as well.

You can find The Geeky Chef's sweetroll recipe here, and a really useful conversion chart here.

Poffins were introduced in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl — delicious bread snacks that you feed your Pokémon to raise their stats for the Pokémon Contest, which is kind of like a cross between a pet show and a beauty pageant. According to Bulbapedia, the word "Poffin" is meant to represent "Pokémon muffins", which sounds a bit weird, but anyway.

Daniella Velli has come up with her own recipe for poffins that has nothing to do with muffins, but is instead based on anpan, a sort of sweet Japanese dessert bread, which she has filled with jam.

You can get Velli's poffin recipe here.

There's a quest in Twilight Princess that sees you gathering ingredients for a yeti's restorative soup. It has three levels, and at its most potent it can restore eight hearts — and includes pumpkin and goats' cheese. It's probably more appropriate for a winter meal, but it sounds delicious, nevertheless.

Both Gourmet Gaming and The Geeky Chef have come up with recipes for this dish; once again, Velli's is the more complex of the two. You can find the Gourmet Gaming recipe here, and the Geeky Chef recipe here.

After all that feasting, you'll need something to wash it down. Many games use red potions, so any red drink would probably do the trick — but we like this one by Feast of Fiction, a YouTube channel that creates food from games, movies, books and cartoons. OK, so it's really just sangria ... but on a summer afternoon, sangria will go down a real treat.