King's Hand

Arseny, a 28 year old baking enthusiast and owner of the Twitter account @thatfrood,[6] told Buzzfeed News that he remembers little of the dream in which the idea for 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."[1] However, he does recall that within the dream it was the main course of a feast during a festival celebration.

After waking up, Arseny immediately wrote down the ingredients for King's Hand, in a group chat shared with his friends, so as not to forget the meal. “I was thinking, This doesn't make sense, but of course it doesn't make sense. I saw it in a dream. This recipe isn't real, and I'm not following any, so I kind of just made it up,” he said. “It's hard for me to tell you how King's Hand tasted; I dreamed it up in my dreams, so when I bit into it, it was very rewarding. I was like, oh my god, I'm eating my dream food. If another person were to bite into King's Hand, they could barf. I don't know.”

After posting his creation on Twitter, Arseny was surprised to find his post going viral almost immediately. “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, but added that he has been able to laugh at the vast majority of the comments on his post.

On December 16, 2020, Arseny created a modified version of the Hand, using falafel instead of cookie dough.[7] This modification on the original recipe was subsequently referred to as "Shepard's Hand," to distinguish it from the original creation.

As of December 15, 2020, King's Hand has been mentioned as a viral social media phenomenon in a diverse array of media and print publications, including Fox News,[2] Delish.com,[5] Buzzfeed News,[1] Indian Express,[8] and many others.[9][10][11]

The viral nature of the original tweet led many people both on and off Twitter to share their own dream-inspired foods online. Some of the dream-inspired foods mentioned included "Milk Noodle," a serving of cold cooked macaroni floating in a bowl of milk; a "cubelectra," a drink of "bright, iridescent blue, steaming backlit liquor" which was served in a square glass with rounded corners; two giant M&M's served in a clay pot full of dirt; an unnamed curry "that was held aloft above a fire in a muslin bag and the whole thing was smoked, served with brown rice and a weird purple cocktail drink";[12] "Earl Gray hot cocoa," a mixture of hot chocolate and Earl Gray tea,[2] as well as "chamomile coffee," made by pouring coffee (rather than water) over chamomile tea bags.[3] Another user described a dream-food which she was inspired to make called “cucumber cookies,” described as "batter dipped cucumber slices, fried, coated in cinnamon sugar & then sandwiched together with an apple pie filling & drizzled with caramel."[12] King's Hand was also compared to "The Sinner's Sandwich" from the video game Deadly Premonition.[8] According to Yahoo! News, Twitter user @gracieelectric created a modified version of King's Hand without using a mold, dubbing it "King's Handwich".[4] On December 28, 2020, Fox News proclaimed King's Hand to be one of the "strangest food combinations of 2020".[13]