Abstract
Problem: Why do so many Tim Cain games contain hidden real-world recipes, and where did this tradition come from?
Approach: Tim Cain traces the history from his personal discovery of baking through every game he shipped, explaining which recipe appeared where and why.
Findings: The tradition began with a pumpkin muffin recipe hidden on the Stonekeep CD, grew through Fallout, Arcanum, and Temple of Elemental Evil, and culminated in a full cookbook for the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter. Each recipe was a real one from Tim's life, rewritten to fit the game's lore.
Key insight: A personal hobby became a beloved Easter egg tradition spanning decades — real recipes, themed to fit each game world, connecting the developer's life to the player's experience.
How Tim Learned to Bake
Tim Cain grew up the youngest of five kids and never learned to cook at home. When he moved off campus in his third year of college, his roommate Jeff — who was putting himself through school as a sous chef — could make incredible dishes like trout almondine. To complement Jeff's cooking, Tim started learning to bake.
He was drawn to baking because it's fundamentally different from cooking. Cooking is improvisational — "the jazz of cooking" — where you taste and adjust on the fly. Baking is precise measurement and engineering, which suited Tim's studies perfectly.
The Grad School Baking Frenzy
When Tim went to grad school in California without a car, he baked even more. One month he baked a different recipe every single day, giving leftovers to classmates and neighbors. His neighbor Catherine eventually begged him to stop dropping things off because she and her roommate Megan had gained weight — then came back three days later to see if he'd made anything new.
Tim baked so much chocolate that he was buying 10-pound blocks of Ghirardelli dark chocolate from Trader Joe's. After his third purchase, the cashier finally asked if he was buying them as gifts.
The Pumpkin Muffin Recipe That Started It All
Tim's most popular creation at Interplay was his chocolate chip pumpkin muffins. The base recipe came from his friend Beth's muffin cookbook. Tim modified it by replacing the spices with his mother's pumpkin pie spice blend — cinnamon, nutmeg, and just a touch of cloves (no ginger). He also increased the chocolate chips.
His mother's philosophy about cloves became a small cooking insight: even though both Tim and his mom hate cloves, she insisted a tiny amount was necessary — "if you don't put a little bit of clove in, it doesn't taste right." Tim muses this might be "the origin of flaws — you need something a little wrong to make something really right."
Stonekeep: The First Hidden Recipe
When Stonekeep was nearing completion, Tim had done some programming work on it (a critical error handler for the CD reading algorithm, written in assembly). Chris Taylor wanted to put the pumpkin muffin recipe on the disc as a hidden text file, rewritten to sound like something the Shadow King eats. It turned out to be surprisingly popular with players who discovered it.
Fallout: Mushroom Clouds and Taco Salad
For Fallout, the team continued the tradition with two recipes: Chris Taylor contributed a taco salad recipe, and Tim included his recipe for "mushroom clouds" — meringue cookies shaped like mushrooms. These are made from meringue caps and stems glued together with dark chocolate, originally from a Christmas Yule Log cake recipe book.
The mushroom cookies take about six hours to make: 20 minutes of mixing, two hours of slow-baking at 200°F, cooling, then snipping stems, melting chocolate, and assembling. Tim brought them to a friend's fancy Christmas party in Newport Beach for roughly 27 years. The caterers loved them and asked for the recipe — but when they saw it took six hours, they declined to add it to their repertoire.
The mushroom cloud recipe appeared on the back page of the Fallout manual, alongside a photo of Tim holding a tray of them.
Arcanum: Mom's Banana Bread
For Arcanum, Tim included his mother's banana bread recipe, pretty much unchanged (possibly with a little added cinnamon). He rewrote it to sound like a halfling recipe, fitting the game's fantasy setting. It was well received.
Temple of Elemental Evil: The Rejected Recipe
Tim wanted to include a recipe in Temple of Elemental Evil, but publisher Atari refused — no room in the manual, no time to "waste" on it. Tim wrote it up anyway as a hidden file: his chocolate chip cookie recipe, framed as a halfling recipe found on a dead orc. The recipe came from a secretary at UCI who gave Tim recipes after learning about his chocolate obsession.
This was the recipe Tim kept pushing to its limits — starting from one cup of chocolate chips and progressively increasing to one and a half, two, two and a half, and three cups. At three and a half cups, the cookies wouldn't hold together, collapsing into "a puddle of melted chocolate with dough blobs in it" (which he ate anyway — "delicious dough blobs"). He settled on three cups and called them "Chocolate Chip Cookies of the Gods." The dough had to be refrigerated overnight for the flavors to meld properly.
Pillars of Eternity: The Full Cookbook
When Pillars of Eternity was Kickstarted and the public response was enormous, Josh Sawyer asked Tim if he'd contribute recipes — plural. Tim ended up picking 10 to 12 recipes ranging from simple (egg salad — "if you could boil water and hard boil eggs, you can make this") to complex. Josh rewrote them to be thematic to the Pillars universe. The collection became a Pillars of Eternity cookbook offered as a higher-tier Kickstarter reward.
The Outer Worlds Mystery
Tim didn't contribute a recipe to The Outer Worlds, but one appeared anyway — for the "concentrated distillate." The artist who placed it in the game (Bree) thought it came from Tim. Her boss, art director Dan Alpert, also assumed it was Tim's. It wasn't. Tim has no idea where the recipe originated. Someone traced it to something from a convention called "Apple something," but the recipe was slightly different. The mystery remains unsolved — Tim has asked anyone who knows to tell him.
The End of an Era
Tim notes he's mostly stopped including recipes in games. He also switched off carbs a few years ago and has adapted some of his recipes to be low-carb versions, which he says translate well. The recipes from his games can still be found online by searching for the game name and "recipe."
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz96ELi0EjE