User:Yitzilitt/King's Hand

King's Hand is a dessert made of M&M's and cookie dough, molded into the shape of a hollow hand and filled with Greek salad. It was invented by Twitter user @thatfrood, a 28-year-old data analyst, who says the idea for the dish came to him in a dream in which it was the main course of a festival feast. After a week of experimentation, he posted a series of photos on Twitter on December 6, 2020. Later that day, he shared his recipe. As of December 15, 2020, the tweet had garnered over 166,000 likes and was featured in a diverse array of media and print publications, including Fox News, TODAY, and BuzzFeed News. The original post inspired people to make their own versions, as well as descriptions of foods that had appeared in others' dreams.

Background
Arseny, who prefers to be referred to by his first name, told Buzzfeed News that he remembered only a little of the dream in which King's Hand was revealed to him, saying, "I wish I remembered more about the King's Hand dream other than King's Hand, [but that's] kind of the nature of it, right?... Normally you don't remember a dream." However, he does recall that it was the main course of a festival feast.

Immediately after waking, Arseny wrote down the ingredients in a group chat so as not to forget the recipe.

Arseny discussed the process on Twitter. "First, you will need to make a mold of a hand. For this, I used food-grade silicone putty safe up to 400 deg. I ordered it online. It takes an hour to go solid." He used the putty to make a cast of his own hand, placing M&Ms into the knuckles and fingernails of the cast before adding cookie dough and baking the result. He then made a Greek salad, filling the hollow inside of the hand to complete the meal.

Arseny was surprised to find his post rapidly become popular. “I'm just constantly watching the thing refresh and seeing what everybody says. Some things are very mean. I think people need to think about the fact that I do see these,” he said. He added that he laughed at the majority of the comments.

On December 16, 2020, Arseny created a modified version of the Hand using falafel instead of cookie dough. This was subsequently referred to as "Shepherd's Hand".

Popularity and cultural influence
The viral tweet led many others to share their own dream-inspired foods. These included "Earl Gray hot cocoa," a mixture of hot chocolate and Earl Gray tea; an unnamed curry that was held aloft above a fire in a muslin bag and was smoked, served with brown rice and a purple cocktail drink; as well as "chamomile coffee," made by pouring coffee (rather than water) over chamomile tea bags. Another user offered “cucumber cookies,” described as "batter-dipped cucumber slices, fried, coated in cinnamon sugar & then sandwiched together with an apple pie filling & drizzled with caramel."

King's Hand was compared to "The Sinner's Sandwich" from the video game Deadly Premonition. According to Yahoo! News, Twitter user @gracieelectric created a modified version of King's Hand without using a mold, dubbing it "King's Handwich". On December 28, 2020, Fox News proclaimed King's Hand to be one of the "strangest food combinations of 2020".