I’m not sure I’d last very long in the Squid Game universe.
The iconic Netflix series puts challengers through their paces with games like Red Light, Green Light, Tug-of-War and Marbles, which all take on a deadly twist. And now those challenges are being recreated for a new – thankfully lower stakes – reality show, Squid Game: The Challenge, which will see real-life competitors try to win $4.56million.
While it might be a bit difficult to construct a mile-high robot shooting lasers from its eyes in the comfort of my own home, I was keen to get in on the challenge myself. So I decided to try the Dalgona Cookie Challenge.
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In the Netflix series, players in their green tracksuits are handed a cookie each, impressed with a faint shape. They have to remove the shape without cracking it, by any means possible. Some try stabbing the cookies with a thin needle, others break it off by hand, but the easiest method seems to be by licking away the sugary treat to leave the final shape behind.
(Image: Netflix)
Those who fail… get shot in the head.
It already wasn’t looking good for me. I found a simple dalgona recipe online, which only required sugar and baking soda to make, and got to cooking. First you heat three tablespoons of sugar in a pan, wait until it melts to a liquid, and add a tiny pinch of baking soda.
That’s where things quickly started to go wrong. It’s incredibly difficult to stop the sugar from burning even on a low heat, and by the time it was ready to spread onto some greaseproof paper, there was no time to arrange the mixture into anything resembling a circular cookie shape, because it was already starting to set.
(Image: Netflix)
Instead, I smoothed it out into a rectangular shape as best I could using a spatula, and, short of any cookie cutters, used the edge of a drinking glass to impress a circular shape on the treacly mix before it hardened. After a few minutes, both the cookie and I were ready.
My first tactic was licking the edges away, since it worked so well on screen. But the mixture tasted so strongly of burnt sugar that I could only persevere for mere moments before giving up, and started to hack away by hand.
So far, so good. This is surprisingly easy, I thought! I would have won the big bucks no problem! The circular shape held, and it seemed almost impossible to go out of the lines. And then… disaster struck.
(Image: Netflix)
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A tiny corner of the circle snapped. I could practically feel the helmeted guards turning their weapons on me. Thankfully, it was just me alone in the kitchen, so I decided to give myself a second chance and continued gently breaking off the edges.
I got about a quarter of the way around my circle before a whole chunk of the centre broke away, scuppering my chances of survival. That’s that, then. I wouldn’t last a minute in the hallowed halls of Squid Game.
Hopefully a series of contestants this month will succeed where I failed in games like Trick or Treat, War and Circle of Trust.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk