Endangered Souffle

A trope that is little-used these days without actually being discredited, this could be found occasionally on Dom Coms up until the early 1970s, particularly those with child characters. A cook is attempting to bake a souffle for a fancy party or important dinner. Unfortunately, they must do so under riotous circumstances, with a consequent paranoia about the souffle collapsing. Naturally, some event — rambunctious children or a slamming door or a car backfiring — does indeed make the souffle fall, thus "spoiling" the event.

Two variations on this trope exist: In one, the rambunctious behavior around the souffle is quieted down with no ill effects, only to have a relatively-distant disturbance (slamming door, car backfire) collapse the souffle after it is "safe" (the souffle can be replaced by say, a sleeping baby). The other works much the same, except that it is the cook him- or herself which triggers the collapse.

In reality, the only way to drop a soufflé into a puddle of goo is to:

1. Open the oven prematurely (sponge cakes are also subject to this)
2. Improperly construct it so that the fat in the yolk mixture destabilizes the foamy whites mixture. Refer to the relevant Good Eats episode. What Alton Brown doesn't say, though, is that it is laughably easy to do this, especially given mid-20th century ingredients and equipment.

See also Carrying a Cake.

Examples of Endangered Souffle include:

Comics

• Gaston Lagaffe once bakes an enormous souffle to cheer up his chronically depressed cousin. Initially it seems to work, but collapses at a critical moment, resulting in the "most depressing sight ever." Probably justified, since Gaston is a Cordon Bleugh Chef often bordering on a Lethal Chef.
  • He also accidentally transformed a Grand Marnier bottle into a rocket grenade while trying to flambee some crepes, missing the french president's limousine in a nearby parade by only a few meters.

Fanfic

• Used straight but comedically in the notorious 'Sith Academy' Slash Fic series; the humor of the situation comes from the fact that the person baking the chocolate souffle is Darth Maul, a vicious-minded Sith Lord who otherwise has the patience of a hyperactive weasel, while what causes it to collapse (and Maul to fly into a homicidal rage) is two Jedi Knights (Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui Gon Jinn, as it happens) having noisy sex in the apartment next door.

Film

• It happens with a cake in Harriet the Spy, only Harriet deliberately stomps and knocks over some chairs after the cook tells her to be quiet.
• The 2000 Charlie's Angels movie has Lucy Liu's character Alex attempting to keep her souffle intact while the trailer she's in is getting perforated with bullets. The souffle never stood a chance.
• Appears in How to Murder Your Wife with the wife's famous "lasagna souffle".
  • There really is such a thing as a lasagne souffle. It is a Greek (not Italian) appetizer involving several different kinds of cheese.
• A recurring gag in the Shaquille O'Neal superhero movie Steel.
• Averted in the Christopher Reeve Superman film. Supes is cooking a souffle with his heat vision, and Lois stops him just in time.

"You must never overcook souffle!"

Live Action TV

• A distant relative of this trope is illustrated by the episode of I Love Lucy in which the gang is in a cabin at the base of a mountain slope, trying not to trigger an avalanche.
• The Catherine Tate Show does with with a pair of new parents attending a dinner party and being forced to eat in the car for fear of waking the baby.

"Are you insane? She's asleep - we can't move her!"

• Subverted in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine of all places, where they sneak weapons into a prison under the pretense of delivering a souffle, and when a guard demands to investigate it, they warn him to be careful with it...right before they knock him out with the Off-Button Hypospray, causing his head to fall into the souffle and crush it.
  • Also referenced by Sisko, when he relates to how his father used to say: "Worry and doubt are the greatest enemies of a great chef. The soufflé will either rise or it won't; there's not a damn thing you can do about it, so you might as well just sit back and wait and see what happens."
• In The Brady Bunch, Alice keeps trying to shush the kids and then collapses the souffle herself by knocking over a pan with a loud crash.
• An episode of Are You Being Served had the opposite problem, in which Mr Humphries was trying to hold down a souffle that was growing out of control.
• In the Master Chef semi-finals, the contestants had to make a chocolate souffle. Whitney, the eventual winner had a case of both Carrying a Cake and Endangered Souffle as she had to hurry and present the souffle to the judges as the souffle slowly sank.
• In one episode of My Three Sons, "Happy Birthday, World," son Robbie tries to earn extra money by setting up a home business making birthday cakes. At one point, while he's making a set of cakes, a door is slammed in the house and causes the three cakes in the oven to collapse.
  • Oddly enough the cakes that do come out of the oven fine look very much to have been topped already and put back in the pans upside-down giving them perfectly square tops.
• Used as a major plot point in an episode of Wimzies House.
• Used in an episode of The Golden Girls, although the souffle in question is never seen. In the episode where Rose is revealed to have a dependency on painkillers, she has violent mood swings when her prescription runs out; a local producer is trying to film a commercial in the kitchen with Sophia, and Rose comes in and tears him a new one for endangering the souffle that no one knew she was making.
  • Betty White was involved in another souffle scene in The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Chloris Leachman's character Phyllis deliberately collapses a souffle Sue Ann Nivens (White) is baking when Phyllis finds out about Nivens' affair with her husband.

Puppet Shows

• A variation on The Muppet Show: The Swedish Chef's soufflé comes out of the oven so light it actually floats into the air. He shoots an arrow at it in an attempt to get it to fall down. It falls down, all right...in both senses of the word.

Swedish Chef: The freesbee soufflé.

Web Comics

• To stop an insane conscious Castle Heterodyne kitchen in Girl Genius one only needs to shout, "You'll collapse my soufflé!"

Western Animation

• Time Squad, Larry attempts to finish his latest creation - a Rose Petal Soufflé - when Tuddrussel and Otto come in to pull pranks on him.
• Inverted in The Tick, where a mad baker attempts to create a giant soufflé to smother The City. To collapse the soufflé, the Tick must shoot himself out of a cannon at the speed of sound.
• In an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob causes the collapse of Squidward's soufflé after it's removed from the oven.
• Futurama:
  • When long-time chef show host Helmut Spargle is replaced by the Emeril-esque Elzar, Elzar "BAM"s and causes Spargle's soufflé to collapse.
  • Parodied and justified in later episode "The Mutants are Revolting", which features a soufflé that contains nitroglycerin.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • A plot point early in an episode: Timmy's mom tries to make a pink soufflé, which collapses and turns grey (due to her poor cooking skills, rather than noise). Later, when Timmy makes a wish that everyone and everything were the same, the world goes grey-scale, and everyone becomes identical blobs. Cosmo and Wanda can't find Timmy until he recreates his trademark pink hat using another of his mother's collapsed soufflés, which was supposed to be grey.
  • In another episode, Timmy wishes Jorgen to his location while the latter was making a soufflé. Jorgen then threatens Timmy that if his soufflé were to fall, he would bake him a mighty cake of death.
• This happens to Reverend Lovejoy in The Simpsons, when a phone call from Ned Flanders distracted him long enough from his soufflé for it to collapse. Lovejoy: Damn Flanders...
• On Cyberchase, Matt and Digit are competing in a televised cooking competition with Hacker and one of his henchmen (Buzz). Buzz tries to sabotage Matt and Digit's soufflé by creating a loud noise to make it fall flat, but Digit, who has repeatedly been stated throughout the series to have some degree of cooking skill, says that it was possible to re-inflate the soufflé by using a certain number of drops of water on it at a certain rate.
• Dave the Barbarian makes an 'Armageddon Soufflé', not realizing that it is "not only a tasty end to any meal, but a tasty end ... TO THE WORLD!" It wreaks havoc, only being collapsed when Dave's family chops down a tree, which lands on Dave's toe and makes him scream like an opera singer.
• In Recess, the gang decides to save Vince from being sent to France by sabotaging his soufflé test by popping a paper bag, but they try to stop the sabotage once they hear that Vince actually wants to go.
• In one episode of Strawberry Shortcake's Berry Bitty Adventures, Berrykin Bloom's loud bassoon-playing collapses the soufflés that Strawberry made.
• Discussed in Angela Anaconda, when Gordy and Angela's brothers are making a soufflé and tell her to be quiet because it's in the oven.
• In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "An Ed Too Many", Jimmy is moping about Sarah leaving him to go swoon over Edd when the soufflé he's baking for lunch finishes; it collapses almost immediately. Jimmy: Darn egg whites!
• An episode of Madeline, where Madeline and her friends are learning how to cook at Cordon Bleu has this happen to Nicole. The soufflé she makes is tres manifique, but then it deflates. She cries.
• A common thing that happens not only to Greedy's soufflés, but also his muffins, in The Smurfs (1981).
• Spoofed in Chowder. One episode has Chowder become unable to open his mouth without unleashing fire at a time when the Catering Co. has an order for a Barbershop Soufflé, which requires 4 people to sing in order to rise. When Chowder opens his mouth, the soufflé is instantly ruined. Soufflé:Why, Chowder? WHY?
• The Day My Butt Went Psycho!: Lampshaded in one episode when Deuce and Elanor's fighting is wrecking everything Zack does. He comments that he probably picked the wrong day to bake a soufflé. Just as he takes it out of the oven, Deuce and Elanor thunder past. Miraculously, the soufflé survives. Then Deuce returns to shout (through a megaphone) how amazing it is that the soufflé didn't collapse...
• Arthur:
  • The episode "Arthur's Family Feud" involves either Arthur or D.W. destroying their dad's soufflé by making it fall... off the table and onto the floor, that is. The relevance of it being a soufflé was that Mr. Read had never successfully made one before and was especially crestfallen that his hard work had gone to waste. The bulk of the episode involves their dispute over who was to blame for it.
  • In "Dad's Dessert Dilemma," Arthur's dad experiments with combining different desserts, to little success. One such creation is cinnamon toast soufflé, which deflates as soon as he takes it out of the toaster.
• In the Animaniacs Season 6 episode "Grocery Store", Wakko bought Frozen Ready Bread Dough to use as a soufflé for deflating to sitpop.
• An episode of CatDog had Cat making a soufflé and trying to keep Dog quiet so it doesn't collapse. Then Winslow walks in and Cat begs him not to say a word, which he complies, but slams his front door shut, causing the soufflé to cough and deflate. Winslow: I didn't say a word.
• In an episode of Rayman: The Animated Series, Cookie bakes a cake as part of a meal for Inspector Grub's date, but then Lac-Mac loudly drops a large stack of plates, collapsing it.
• Happens on the Classic Disney Short "Mickey's Birthday Party" with the cake Goofy is making. The first time the cake comes out fine, but when Goofy sticks a straw to see if it's done the cake deflates like a balloon. The second time, Goofy is trying to sneak away quietly but trips on a rolling pin, causing the cake to collapse so hard it breaks through the floor.
• On an episode of The Flintstones Fred does this when he opens the oven while trying to retrieve a diamond ring that got baked into the cake.
• One of the winter My Little Pony: Equestria Girlsshorts puts a more realistic spin on the threat of this: Pinkie Pie is attempting to get a soufflé to Rarity, an endeavor which has failed in the past because she was too slow and the pastry collapsed when it cooled down too much. On top of this, she has to get it through a massive snowball fight in her front yard: as Sunset Shimmer realizes, one hit and the soufflé is done for.
• In the Total Drama episode "If You Can't Take The Heat", Lindsay and Gwen are put in charge of the citrus-macadamia upside-down cake flambé for the cooking challenge, but they pour too much flammable liquid on it and Heather's attempt to light it ends up burning off her eyebrows. They try to salvage it by covering the whole thing with orange sauce, but the second Chris' fork touches it, it deflates into a tiny, inedible ball of ash.
• In Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, the characters are chasing the villains through a television studio. They disrupt a cooking show, and this becomes a Discussed Trope because they destroy the soufflé before it can even be put in the oven. TV Chef: Today, on Looking At Cooking, we will be making ze soufflé. (cracks two eggs into the batter) Remember, ze soufflé must be made just right, or it will be ze... (costumed animals crash through the studio. General pandemonium. The batter splashes all over the chef) ...disaster.
• This happened twice in The Proud Family every time Trudy makes a soufflé.
• In an episode from The Smurfs (2021), Chef and Greedy make a harrowing trip through the Smurf Forest in order to deliver a souffle intact to a festival, only for it to collapse the moment after it reaches the festival.