Dark Dish Lab: A Cursed Recipe Generator

What I Built Dark Dish Lab is a tiny, delightfully useless web app that generates cursed food or drink recipes. You pick: Hated ingredients Flavor chaos (salty / sweet / spicy / sour) Then it generates a short “recipe” with a horror score, a few steps, and a warning. It solves no real-world problem. It only creates regret. Demo YouTube demo Code GitHub repo How I Built It Frontend: React (Vite) Ingredient + flavor selection UI Calls backend API and renders the generated result Backend: Spring Boot (Java 17) POST /api/generate endpoint Generates a short recipe text and returns JSON Optional AI: Google Gemini API If AI is enabled and a key is provided, it asks Gemini for a very short recipe format If AI is disabled or fails, it falls back to a non-AI generator Notes Only Unicode emojis are used (no emoji image assets) API keys are kept in local env files and not committed How I Leveraged Google AI Gemini (via the Gemini API) is the text generator behind Dark Dish Lab’s “cursed recipe” ou