They say that when Adriano Zumbo made his first Zumbaron, he gazed upon his creation and murmured softly to himself, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” He knew that from this point, there was no going back.
It is only now that we, the populace upon which he has performed his experiment in civilisational transformation, are beginning to realise what he meant.
The Zumbaron, his macaron, is the perfect example of what the man does: he takes solid, reliable institutions and distorts them into something entirely new, and entirely terrifying. He shows us visions of what our world could be like, if only we dare to dream – and before we know it we are living no longer in this world, but in Zumbo’s.
The television program Zumbo’s Just Desserts is merely the culmination of the plan Zumbo set in motion many years ago. How many years? Impossible to tell: Zumbo is ageless, and no extant society possesses any record of a time when there was no Zumbo. But he has always been working towards this show, and the subversive new paradigm it has unleashed upon the world. Not for nothing is it named “Just Desserts”; Zumbo has looked at humanity, judged us, and determined what we deserve – and now he is giving it to us, whether we like it or not.
This week, Zumbo presents his hapless aspiring dessert artisans with a newly morbid cake shaped like Willy Wonka’s hat that literally levitates. It hovers in the air, mocking all the laws of God and Man, for God and Man combined are as nothing to the glory and the terror of Zumbo.
He does not present this lightly. He knows how the world will receive the news that cakes can fly. He knows that once we know of cake levitation, we will never recapture the innocence and simplicity of the pre-airborne-patisserie era, even if we want to. Just as Thomas Edison knew that once we saw the lightbulb we would be incapable of even fathoming a candle, Adriano Zumbo knows that a species which knows of flying cakes can never unknow that knowledge.
The best thing about the end of the Olympics is no more Channel 7 promos. I could not care less about how Zumbo made that cake float.
— Ben Cubby (@bencubby) August 22, 2016
The same goes for all his creations. Who can be satisfied with a macaron when they know there are Zumbarons in the world? Once you have seen Zumbo’s Reflective Dessert, what point is there in even bothering with the dull matte finish of all the desserts that have come before?
Zumbo himself popularised the croquembouche, but once he had us in that monumental dessert’s clutches, he said to us, “No. It is no longer enough to desire a normal croquembouche. You must instead lust for this weird croquembouche that I’ve made go all crazy and stuff.”
And more than this – more than the bending of all men and women to his will that Zumbo performs with each new dessert – the man, if “man” is even an apt description for such a being, demands that lesser mortals assume the burden of making the desserts themselves.
Here is the essence of his colossal, cruel genius: he will draw us inexorably into a world of his creation, and then amuse himself by watching us toil endlessly in futile attempts to match him.
“All have sinned and come short of the glory of Zumbo,” Zumbo bellows – yet he will not allow us to stop trying.
Many have compared Zumbo to famous fictional child-torturer Willy Wonka, immortalised by the recently deceased Gene Wilder, yet even Wonka asked less of his subjects. Wonka would taunt, he would tease, he would enslave indigenous peoples – he would, apparently, literally murder anyone he felt like – but he would not demand that those he subjugated ape him for his own distraction. Only Zumbo requires this, and this is why we cannot help but hate him, and why we cannot help but love him.
It is not a matter of whether we want to obey him – when he issues his orders, we know we were made to obey him. A pavlova with a tart inside? A cake in the shape of a helicopter? A meringue turntable that actually plays records? A profiterole that only tells the truth? We will strive to make them, and we will fail, and we will feel the sting of his wrath, and it will hurt exquisitely, and we will beg for more, for all we ask is that Zumbo cast his eye upon us.
It should be quite clear by this stage that Zumbo is in complete control. Look at Monday night’s episode, when the contestants’ creations were judged by a gang of “Zumbinos” – small, pastry-loving children who were, as I understand it, grown in a lab from cuttings taken from Zumbo’s scalp. What chance has any world of resisting a Zumbocracy when the man can endlessly replicate himself? When any army raised by any nation can be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, as Zumbo simply makes new Zumbos to replace those who fall in battle?
And then contrast his creation of new life with the presence of contestant Michael, who is quite clearly Zumbo himself, 50 years in the future, brought back to our time by some arcane trick of eldritch bakery. Is it any wonder we are in the Age of Zumbo, when he has power not only over people, but over time itself?
No, the world has changed irrevocably. We are no longer in a universe where three layers are enough for a cake. We must have seven layers, 17 layers, 27 layers – we must build a tower of layers that reaches to the very heavens, and even then we will not satisfy Zumbo, for he will have made one of his own and topped it with a photorealistic effigy of Winston Churchill made entirely of caramelised mandarins.
And yet, submission is sweet, and sticky, and crunchy, with a hint of lime and a surprising explosion of raspberry jam in the middle. With each new dessert our will weakens, with each new cake we slaver and fall upon our knees in supplication, and with every new edible thing that looks like a thing that traditionally is not edible, we willingly hand over a little more autonomy in exchange for a taste, not merely of the foodstuff, but of Zumbo’s world-changing power itself.
It will not stop here. Look at that huge, pulsing braincase: does that look like a cranium that will be satisfied with anything less than absolute power? As he transforms our concept of the dessert, he will transform our concept of the universe itself. As he builds layers of cake, he will reform the strata of human society, and when the cities of the Earth stand, bright and sparkling and candy-coloured, made in his own image, he will declare, “I am Zumbo, Lord of Pastry. Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair.”
Rest assured, you helpless drones: these are NOT Just Desserts.
