Well Fed Buff: Maiev's Grudge

Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff serves up tasty dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – and hips hath no padding like those gained from Maiev's Grudge. This decadent dessert is truly epic in content: powdered sugar, melted butter, graham crackers, semi-sweet chocolate ... demonic possession, jealousy and revenge (trust me, you want to be sure anyone in aggro range is disarmed or silenced if there's any doubt as to loot rules for this dessert) ... Maiev's Grudge has it all.

Before we take a look at the no-bake combine itself, I'd like to point you over to Elizabeth Wachowski's cheeky Know Your Lore post about Maiev Shadowsong. Once you've witnessed the scope of Maiev's reckless disregard for calories the greater good, you'll understand why GRaham crackers plus fUDGE adds up to Maiev's Grudge.

The mats

1 lb. powdered sugar
2 (or more) sticks butter, softened or melted
1 cup creamy peanut butter
½ box graham crackers, crushed
2 12-oz. bags semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted

The tools
Large mixing bowl
Potato masher (optional but handy)
1 quart-size heavy-duty/freezer Ziploc
Casserole dish or cake pans

Prepare your mats
Soften (or completely melt; your choice) the butter. A couple of bursts of Arcane Missiles in the microwave (30 seconds or less) should soften up the target.

Your next task is to crush the graham crackers. This is where your melee skills come in handy; low-level humans will especially enjoy this part of the quest line. Either leave the graham crackers in their plastic liner(s), or take them out and put them into a quart-size, heavy-duty (freezer) Ziploc bag. Select a main-hand blunt weapon (a hammer, a heavy book, a 19-pound Catfish ... extra skill points for arrpee action here) and crush the crackers inside the package liner or Ziploc. Reserve a couple of spoonsful of crushed crackers to sprinkle on the finished Grudge at the end. One word of caution: You don't want any crits on the bag, or it'll burst and send shardlings everywhere. Even your mage will walk out in disgust at this point. Not pretty.

Don't start melting the chocolate yet -- you still have work to do. In fact, now's a good time for stamina and strength buffs.

Step 1: Heavy tanking
Under no circumstances should you allow a cloth-wearer to solo this quest. Recruit a heavy tank for the combine, which requires a fair amount of stamina and endurance. Warriors are a natural, since a particularly stiff batch of "dough" generates high amounts of rage.

The strategy: Send in the tank and have him taunt all the ingredients except the chocolate chips into a large mixing bowl. Cream everything (that means "smush," for you snooty types who didn't pick up Cooking) together. A potato masher comes in handy at this point, but any weapon that can dish out some good blunt damage will do nicely. Yes, we know it's hard to stir. Yes, we know it takes a while to get those last little lumps squooshed out. Didn't you remember your strength and stamina buffs? We warned you.

Once the mixture is nice and smooth, press it into a pan (a cake pan, casserole, etc.) and call in the casters.

Step 2: More DoTs!

The next step is perfect for casters, since it involves care and damage over time. You can even have them start on this while the tank is at work – but don't start too early, or you'll run into problems with snare effects on the chocolate (as noted below).

Melt the chocolate chips. You don't have to have epic cooking gear to do this right. For those of you who haven't completed any of the instances that drop double boilers, two saucepans provide equivalent stats (although you will, unfortunately, suffer from that "I just arrived in the Outland and look like a clown" effect). Fill the first saucepan about one-third to one-half of the way with water and put it on to boil. Fill the other with the chocolate chips. When the water boils, place the pan with the chips on top, slightly tilted so that it fits inside the other pan and all the chips nestle together down at the bottom in the heat. (It's worth noting that you can once again ask a mage to melt the chocolate with Arcane Missiles in the microwave, but it's very easy to overshoot the right consistency. Mages tend to get whiny if you ask them to interrupt channeling so you can check things out, after all.)

The key here is the slow application of heat; too much too fast will cause it to scorch or crystallize. Stir, stir, stir the whole time, and get ready to pour out the melted chocolate as soon as it reaches pouring consistency. If you wait too long, a snare effect sets in and the whole thing resembles Encased Corrupt Ooze. No AFKing! The motto for this stage bears a striking resemblance to raid instructions for Onyxia: "DoTs! More DoTs!"

The moment the chocolate reaches a smooth consistency, pour it onto the prepared mixture base that your tank has positioned in the pan. Those of you who like a pleasing presentation may sprinkle a few leftover graham cracker crumbs on top.

Loot up
Allow the whole thing to cool before eating, but steer frost mages away – refrigerating Maiev's Grudge makes the chocolate too hard to slice. Guilds with efficient loot systems will want to pre-slice their Grudge while still soft, prior to master looting; refrigerate afterwards, with a sheet of wax paper or something similar between layers. The rest of us will just have to resign ourselves to Maievian-level machinations and manipulation, scraping our share straight from the pan.

Submit your own Warcraft-themed noshes for Well Fed Buff – we're always looking for a tasty stat boost!