The Cake (And Everything Online) Is A Lie

A pretty common saying is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” yet we seem to all forget that particular wisdom tidbit when it comes to the internet. This can range from trusting a Wikipedia entry to believing that chick from high school is really as perfect and happy as she seems to be on Facebook. I’m not going to go all moral-high-ground ranty on you, but rather share a silly example of yet another thing not to always trust online – recipe gifs.

There is a subreddit devoted entirely to these things, and they’re popping up on my newsfeeds more often than not. It just so happened that one for a cherry recipe showed up right after I bought a bunch of cherries. The video, which you can see here, made it look super fast and easy to throw together. Since my boyfriend is a huge fan of cherry pie it seemed like fate. I hurried to the kitchen, eager to begin my gif recipe journey.

I had watched the video a few times, but had also grabbed the written instructions as that’s how I roll. I gathered my ingredients and my baking wine and turned to the first step with glee. Here is where things quickly fell to pieces.

Let’s back up for a second. Ya’ll know I bake. I do. A lot. Despite my tendency to never follow the directions exactly, everything normally turns out delicious. What I do not do though is bake pies or too many fruity desserts. I don’t really have a reason for this. I mean I’m not a huge fruit fan so that could be part of it, or it could be that I prefer time savers like jarred/canned ingredients and everyone always stresses how fruit desserts are better when they’re fresh fruit. I dunno. The point is that I’ve only ever made one or two pies in my life, so I am in no way a pie or fruit expert.

This became very obvious very quickly, as the first thing I needed to do was pit my cherries. The video showed a hack involving a bottle and a chopstick. I had both of these things. I washed and de-stemmed my cherries and got ready to pop out some pits real quick.

I’m not going to say this hack is a lie, because it technically works to get the pit out of the cherry. But the easy and clean way they present it in the video? FALSE!

I screamed a little when the first cherry pit exploded in a gush of juice. It was horrifically reminiscent of a certain Game of Thrones scene involving the Mountain. Yes, the pit was out, but my cherry was also rather deformed instead of the perfect looking one in the video. I thought maybe I was doing it wrong, so I tried a few more. Same result. I googled cherry pit removal tips and found several entries about the fail process I was already trying, and then another one involving a frosting tip. After several large gulps to harden my resolve, I switched to that method.

Eventually the cherry pits were removed. Almost all my cherries were basically torn in half, and my kitchen looked like a murder scene. There was cherry juice on the counter, on my wine bottle, and ALL over me as well.

I was a little discouraged that the first step had proven to be more difficult than the video indicated, but I continued on. The rest came together easily enough, and I popped my creation into the oven. I think it was the smell as it finished up that first alerted me that something was off from my expectations. While the recipe was called “pie” it obviously lacked a crust, and the description had called it a cross with a cake. In my mind, this translated as actually being a cake. In my boyfriend’s mind, this translated into being like a cheesecake. The actual end product was neither of these things.

Did it look pretty? Well, yeah. After an hourish of hot, sweaty, and mildly terrifying efforts it was nice to see it turn out looking good. As for the taste… NOT my cup of tea. It was neither cake nor pie but almost more like a flan, which I do not enjoy. I took it into work and thankfully my coworkers liked it so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Moral of the story? Do NOT always believe what you see online!

#TheCakeIsALie #NoReallyItWasThisTime #DontTossWordsLikeCakeOrPieAroundIfItDoesntTasteLikeFreakingCakeOrPie