Food Theory: Testing the McDonalds McFlurry Cake! (Viral TikTok Hack)

it's filming day for food theory we're going out we're buying some ice cream and matthew is wearing the only sunglasses he could find i don't have a pair of sunglasses at this point this is like an advertisement for 1983 what you're wearing right now this white jacket these like insane sunglasses these are actually my eye surgery sunglasses never gonna give you up hello internet welcome to food theory the show that believe it or not is even better after you pop it into the microwave theorists if you've been with the food theory channel since the beginning you know that i'm a man who values my cake efficiency and it doesn't get any easier than boxed cake mixes am i right wrong i spent an entire episode showing you how the seemingly simple directions on the back of boxed cakes are in fact needlessly complex and redundant you don't need those eggs there people you could be saving five heck even ten seconds every time you make yourself a boxed cake just think of the things that you could be doing with all that spare time like hitting the notification bell mayhaps point is i've been striving to reach the mountaintop of cake efficiency for the better part of a year but if a recent tic toc trend is to be believed there's still one hill i've yet to climb pour your mcflurry into a bowl and add some self-raising flour and pop it in the microwave for around two minutes and this is the result it's a mcflurry cake and it tastes so good all right tic tac you had my curiosity but now you've got my attention here i am making episodes about reducing four cake ingredients down to three meanwhile y'all are out there making two ingredient cakes using fast food and in the microwave the lazy part of my brain is so turned on right now now just to be clear two ingredient ice cream mug cakes were around long before emma cannon's tick-tock but she definitely deserves credit for putting it on our collective radar in 2021 i mean a mcflurry cake come on that is just fun and it sounds delicious which is exactly why steph and i picked up a mcflurry some self-rising flour and tried it ourselves what a fun festive cup and also not mixed at all there's apparently a miscommunication see this spoon is so awkwardly designed because it's meant to be plugged into the machine and then chuck around so that the topping gets distributed throughout the flurry as it were what you have served me here is a cup of ice cream plus topping after a bit of trial and error we landed on two parts ice cream to one part flour and one minute 45 seconds in the microwave it's fine i mean it doesn't have a lot of flavor to it that's the thing i was gonna say is this cake or is this bread did we make like a sweet bread right it's very lightly sweet it's not as sweet as the ice cream or the cookies in it would lead you to believe i mean it has the consistency look at him looking guilty over there so as i was saying before i was rudely interrupted like it's a little bit firmer than a typical cake it's like a micro it you can feel the effects of the microwave a little bit but honestly if you cook this in the oven you might have like a really legitimate cake right it's not bad yeah not bad for a cake that was literally made with two ingredients in two minutes of cook time so while i definitely think that tic-tacs over-hyping the deliciousness of the mcflurry cake can't help but wonder if there's something here after all this cake did bake ridiculously fast and it's not like the mcflurry is the only frozen fast food dessert out there might a different dessert make for a better tasting cake or is there something special about the mcflurry that allows it to react with self-rising flour in a way that the other desserts don't and this theorists is what we'll be testing today food theory has taken the mcflurry cake trend and amping it up to the next level if there's another fast food dessert that works better as a two ingredient microwavable mug cake we are gonna find it today so strap in theorists today's a fun one food theory is gonna find out which fast food-derived cake takes the cake for being a piece of cake to make so in order to figure out which fast food desserts will and will not cake let's first take a look at self-rising flour which is not the same thing as the more common all-purpose flour you see self-rising flour is a bit of a cheat ingredient because it's actually a mixture of three ingredients that you probably already have in your cupboard all-purpose flour baking powder and salt this mixture was invented in england back in the 1800s when sailors were using self-rising flour or self-raising flour as the brits tend to call it as a simple way to make baked goods during long voyages at sea sort of like how i began using top ramen as a simple way to make food during my long voyage through college so if you want to give today's experiment a try but you don't have self-rising flour in the house don't worry you can easily whip some up by mixing one cup of all-purpose flour one and a half teaspoons of baking powder and a quarter teaspoon of salt that salt is a take it or leave it ingredient by the way the brits tend not to include it but what i want to know is how it works how exactly is it that ice cream plus self-rising flour equals cake well for one thing a lot of ingredients in ice cream are redundant with traditional cake recipes for example here is a recipe for a basic vanilla cake alongside a recipe for brown butter ice cream see how similar the ingredients are sugar check milk and cream check butter vanilla eggs in the end there are exactly three ingredients in the cake that are not in the ice cream our old friends all-purpose flour baking powder and salt so it's easy to see why two ingredient ice cream cakes are a thing the two cheap ingredients involved are basically matching halves of a magical amulet that when combined form a really typical cake recipe of course not every fast food dessert out there is gonna have all the ingredients present the mcflurry doesn't contain eggs for instance and plenty of quick breads manage to rise without sugar involved so what ingredient is actually necessary here clearly something in the ice cream is reacting with the self-rising flour and causing the cake to rise if we know what that one magic ingredient is we won't have to waste our time or money testing fast food desserts that don't contain it so what is the magic ingredient for answers let's take a closer look at self-rising flour and what makes it tick the baking powder's role in all this is to act as the leavening agent which gives the cake its rise see baking powder which i suppose is a cheap ingredient in and of itself is a mixture of baking soda aka sodium bicarbonate which is a base acid salts which are of course acidic and a buffering material to keep the bases and acids from reacting prematurely when water gets introduced into the equation it sets off the whole acid-base reaction which produces carbon dioxide you know how breads and cakes have a bunch of air pockets in them that make them so fluffy and also so great at insulating see also our bread glove episode for more on this yes i made an episode where i wore bread on my hands in public no i will not apologize anyway those air pockets are formed from carbon dioxide bubbles released during the reaction how do they get stuck inside the cake well that's flowers roll in all this flour when mixed with water and exposed to heat hardens this is what gives baked goods their structure and this structure is what traps the air bubbles as for the salt aside from adding flavor it helps absorb moisture that in turn reacts with the baking powder so there you have it the only additional thing that self-rising flour requires aside from heat is water which means that there are a ton of fast food desserts capable of making a cake at least in theory in food alright i'm gonna stop you guys get the point long story short if a dessert is frozen that means it has water if it has water that means it'll react with self-rising flour and that means steph and i have a lot of fast food restaurants to visit today my body is not ready i did an online fitness class this morning does that count yes hey 10 minute chloe ting ab workout this is going to negate that so i started driving us through town looking like rick astley post eye surgery and we nabbed frozen desserts from every fast food restaurant that we passed in addition to the oreo mcflurry from mcdonald's we picked up a classic chocolate frosty from wendy's swells of vanilla frosty a dairy queen we grabbed an orange julius and a raspberry fudge bliss blizzard by the way can i just say how much i love that dairy queen shoots all of their blizzard products upside down that is commitment and i respect it dq now by the time steph and i got to the sonic drive-in we were kind of hungry also let it be known we came here for one item we're leaving with four and i'm regretting not getting a fish i might get a fifth before we leave this parking lot sonic i haven't been to a sonic in years okay parked really far at sonic we ordered an oreo big scoop cookie dough blast and a soft serve vanilla cone and maybe a couple other things put the lime in the coke zero you drink it all up oh that's good the only thing that would make it better if it was harris teeter zero calorie diet cola we gotta go ready yeah these are my sunglasses we haven't been shopping in a really long time you guys got them in a hospital we ordered a bit more than planned at burger king too so since the idea behind this episode is to one see if the mcflurry mug cake can actually work and then two decide if there's anything better than the mcflurry mug cake we're going around to all the different fast food restaurants to get their signature desserts and see hey what can we make a cake out of and at burger king growing up my favorite fast food dessert was the hershey's sundae pie so we're taking an ice cream pie and we're trying to transform it into a non-ice cream cake cake yes there it is meanwhile while we were there i also saw that they had frozen cokes you know i'm really we're just gonna get a frozen coke we're gonna see how it goes i'm still a fan of coke that whopper while we were at burger king whoppers are so good i know we we give burger king a hard time on this channel we do so many takedowns of burger king but the whopper is so good it's great i just like it so much i don't like their twitch advertising strategy but i do like their flame broiled strategy so one last stop it's to a local fast food chain here called cookout and it is known for their milkshakes they have probably what 40 different things you can mix into milkshakes their thing is milkshakes and so my hope is that my go-to order of a chocolate banana pudding oreo milkshake will actually yield the best mug cake today it does sound promising at that point having exhausted every single cup holder in the car even the two on ollie's car seat we returned home i was curious to find out whether skip had forgiven me for the tongue lashing i gave him earlier come on come on give give him a little keys give him a little keys oh fortunately skipper put the whole ordeal behind him an overpowering smell of desserts had ollie on his best behavior too oh what's that tasty thing called i think that might be some soft serve ice cream oh that was very nicely asked for yes of course bean absolutely oh good bites how is it is that good hey ollie do you want to try a little bit of our cake too we tried we made a little bit of cake tell me what you think yeah it's not every day that a two-year-old turns down cake so i'm hoping some of the other contenders turn out better than the mcflurry did anyway steph and i proceeded to add self-rising flour to each fast food dessert we then popped the batter into the microwave where i kept a close close eye on everything you're just walking backwards that does not look like a moonwalk all right i could have probably paid more attention to mug cakes but if i had this portion of the video would have been way more boring anyway we tasted each individual mug cake as it came out of the microwave first up was the oreo sonic blast which turned out pretty much exactly like the mcflurry cake did oh oh that's nice it's still not very sweet it's a thing huh huh it still tastes just like kind of plain cake like it doesn't have again a lot of that vanilla flavor a lot of chocolate flavor but it's nice it's very good we then move down to the chocolate frosty i'm very concerned about this monstrosity i don't know looks like something out of a horror movie whoa hey yo if you have tripped in a phobia or that fear of holes this is not the cake for you not your cake oh it's wacky is that the malt that expanded in like a weird way why is it orange oh this is orange oh this is weird and it smells bad you know that consistency that uh cranberry sauce has when it comes straight out of a can that's what this is oh i i love your frosties but maybe we don't make them into cake it's like okay i mean here's the thing it's not great to look at texture-wise on par with sonic taste-wise i mean again it's just plain cake the vanilla frosty tasted similar and had the exact same gummy cake texture the soft-serve ice cream cone from sonic however had a great cake texture as for the taste i can tell you that this tastes like a pancake which is good yeah it's i mean here's the thing pancakes aren't super flavorful but pretty good hairstyle okay i like pancakes this is moist it's flake like flaky it's crumbly crumbly like a real cake it's soft oh plain vanilla cake is actually like plain vanilla ice cream it's so far the best it's the winner so far by far hands down oh yeah we got a good one i don't know what it says about two ingredient fast food mug cakes when the one that tastes like a pancake is the runaway winner so far but that's where the bar is at i'm afraid next up was the dairy queen blizzard both stephanie had high expectations for this one because its batter had a really strong raspberry flavor when it came out of the microwave though the raspberry taste was nowhere to be found and dairy queen's other contender the creamsicle-flavored orange julius didn't fare any better so this is orange julius floppy there we go he's looking a lot like like those frosty cakes though yeah he's super gelatinous it's like the blob it smells like orange and then it doesn't taste like orange at all yeah it just tastes like mostly cooked flour at this point i was kind of starting to worry that we weren't going to find any real winners in the bunch i mean sure some of these cakes were edible but not what we set out to do i was hoping at least one of the frozen treats would taste better in cake form but so far nothing was even close second episode on a theorist channel in as many weeks to disprove a tick tock theory she was hyping it up in that tic tac she's like this is the most delicious thing ever and my friends who have tried this say it's amazing as well it's not next next now i'll admit there was a lot of pressure on the cookout milkshake to perform not only was i rooting for it as the hometown favorite but cookouts was the only milkshake in the running meaning it was sorta competing on behalf of milkshakes everywhere oh there's that nice chunk of banana right there just sitting there just sitting there just like it does in the milkshake oh all right here you know what this one's all right it has the most flavor are you a little biased let me check i might be here let me let me give you the taste oh okay so interesting actually the banana helps a lot it not only helps actually eating the banana but it seems to have perfused throughout the cake so you actually get like a little bit of banana flavor and then you get kind of that twice baked cookie of the oreo just like kind of in there it's actually really pretty good texture not not super duper but it is moist like if you mixed this with some toppings or maybe like put some i don't know like syrup or icing on it i think you could you could reasonably call this a dessert in the end my chocolate banana pudding oreo milkshake had the most flavor of any contenders thanks to all the chunky ingredients but we weren't able to get a good crumbly cake-like consistency out of the milkshake even with some extra time in the microwave at this point i was getting desperate and we were getting into the weird entries burger king's hershey sunday pie was a spontaneous last minute addition to today's experiment for no real reason other than the fact that i thought turning a pie into cake was really funny as i was waiting in the fast food takeout line and surprisingly the sunday pie held its own it doesn't look as you know triggering as some of the other ones have actually it looks really good it does oh yes it has a crumb texture again consistency oh okay we we may have not mixed the flower as well as it started out drier so it ended up being a little bit drier but honestly i don't hate it it actually tastes like chocolate for the first time in any of these and we've had so many of these with chocolate in them last and definitely least we have the frozen coke from burger king friends i'm not even gonna pretend that this one stood a chance it was doomed from the beginning i think we'll be really lucky to end up with anything that even solidifies in this one i can't even get the flour to dissolve it is literally just like chunking in there are you sure that's not marshmallows it looks like swiss miss hot chocolate it looks like that it's definitely not throw it in the microwave stephanie throw it in chuck it in there gross we're just going to have hot burned coke not even you'll drink that no it's real funny but i will drink that that's a face oh no we're not eating that we're not no we're not eating that oh it has kind of a how's the bouquet i wish i could describe it to you i wish i could describe it to you here try television oh no it smells like hot coke i mean here's the thing it it formulated something that jiggle when it flopped in there man you know what you know it's jelly because jam don't shake oh my gosh [Music] so great huh so good it's great of all of these this one's probably the best for your waistline because you're not gonna you're not gonna swallow it terrible terrible so what can we conclude from all of this well self-rising flour is a really easy to use product capable of creating cake from pretty much any delicious meltable treat you throw at it but is it capable of creating good cake when the only other ingredient is fast food not so much i think ollie's reaction says it all though when he came into the kitchen he was like i want ice cream and we gave him ice cream and i'm like here's this cake made out of ice cream and he took it out of his mouth and handed it back to me that right there says it all friends if you want a cake make a cake if you want ice cream eat ice cream is this actually saving you a whole lot of work not really you still have to go out and get the ice cream right you're still getting the ice cream you still have to have the enriched flour that self rises and what are you getting an okay cake like at best you're getting an okay cake this is one of those times where go figure a hack that you saw online didn't actually produce the magical results that people tell you who was the winner today all the fast food companies that got us to spend an egregious amount of money on their various desserts who's the loser today steph and i because we just consumed a lot of calories and none of it was worth it thanks for watching theorists i just put hot flower saturated coke in my mouth if that's not deserving of a subscription button click i don't know what is despite what you may have seen today steph and i have actually been having a lot of fun with these taste test videos lately be sure to check out our diet cola tournament episode that's right i put my love of diet coke to the test a blind taste test to be more precise and spoiler alert diet coke did not win the tournament that's right turns out there's another diet soda out there that i like the taste of even more something tells me though it'd be pretty mediocre in a two-ingredient mug cake but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,457,053

Rating: 4.9625673 out of 5

Keywords: mcflurry, mcdonalds, tiktok, tiktok mcflurry, mcdonalds mcflurry, mcdonalds ice cream, ice cream cake, ice cream cake hack, tiktok cake hack, mcdonalds cake, tiktok hack, tiktok food hack, food hacks, mcdonalds mcflurry cake, testing tiktok hacks, trying tiktok hacks, tik tok, dessert recipes, food theorists, food theory, matpat, game theorists, film theorists, game theory, film theory, eat the menu, binging with babish, how to make a mcflurry, oreo mcflurry

Id: ThjOpN6guBk

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/s1mon1234]

I added an espresso to my Mcflurry to make a Mcflurry Affogato https://youtu.be/vWdSjsnds4c