Zelda BOTW Side Quest: The Royal Recipe (Fruit Cake & Monster Cake)
🍲 A Quiet Moment in Hyrule
In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, most of my time is spent doing “serious” things— climbing mountains, fighting Guardians, or getting distracted by something on the map.
But sometimes, the moments that stay with me the most are the smallest side quests.
This time, I want to document one that I really liked:
The Royal Recipe
It’s not intense. It’s not difficult. But it feels… surprisingly human.
📜 What Is This Quest About?
In this quest, you meet a soldier named Gotter at Riverside Stable, who used to serve in what is now the ruined Hyrule Castle Town.
He has been trying to recreate dishes once served to the royal family. The problem is—those recipes have long been lost.
All he has left are vague memories, and a bit of stubborn determination.
So naturally, the task falls onto Link.
🔍 Searching for Forgotten Recipes
There’s no combat and no clear guidance in this quest. Instead, you need to explore the Hyrule Castle library yourself.
Inside, you can find two old cookbooks— one on a large wooden table, and another on a small bookshelf.
They reveal two dishes:
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Fruit Cake → Ingredients: 3 different fruits + Tabantha Wheat + Cane Sugar
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Monster Cake → Ingredients: Monster Extract + Goat Butter + Tabantha Wheat + Cane Sugar
One thing I really like about many side quests in this game is that they don’t simply hand you the answer.
You discover things on your own.
And that feeling of finding clues feels more like “living” than solving a puzzle.
🍽️ Recreating the Past
Once you successfully cook the dishes and bring them back to Gotter, the quest is complete.
No boss fight. No dramatic cutscene.
Just someone being genuinely happy because a small piece of the past has been brought back.
🧡 Personal Reflection
This quest gave me a strong realization:
Not every moment in a game needs to be about saving the world.
Sometimes it’s about:
- remembering a culture
- restoring a forgotten daily life
- helping someone complete a small personal goal
While playing this, I felt a bit of resonance.
Because whether it’s building games, creating products, or even managing Airbnb spaces— it all feels similar in a way:
You start with fragments, try to understand how things once worked, and slowly rebuild them.
In a sense, this is also a form of reconstruction.
More gaming journals coming soon.
About the Author
Niki Li is the co-founder of Watershadow Games, an indie game studio based near the Black Forest in Germany, currently developing the music adventure game Hammony. Follow along for more on game development and life abroad.
