Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann
Reardon and you told me that you love this series so today i am doing
another debunking video where I take viral videos that you've
sent to me and examine them and expose the ones that may not be 100%
true ... there could be a little bit of fakery in there. So let's get started ...
this first one is by Blossom. They put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pan
and pour cake batter around it then they open the can ... whew i'm glad they did that
and then they bake it in the oven and they have
oven ready dulce de leche. Then they pour that over the cake
looks amazing but i don't think it's going to work. What do you think and why
do you think it's not going to work? I think it's not going to work because i
don't think it's long enough in the oven to turn the sweetened condensed milk
into dolce de leche but i could be wrong so let me check it out.
You may not realize but with debunking videos i often test these recipes more
than once just to check they definitely don't work
even if I alter a few things in it. So for example with this cake
I baked two of them and I baked one at the normal temperature for this cake and
I baked another one at a lower temperature so I could keep
it in the oven for longer and both had the same result ... the
cake looks good it's baked nicely this looks nice but it doesn't look like
theirs does. And if I move away the top you'll see
that we have just sweetened condensed milk
underneath still, it hasn't gone into that dulce de leche caramel at all.
The solution to this would be to take this out
and add in a can of caramel top and fill which here in Australia the same brand
does both of those and that looks much like what they had. Here is the one baked in the oven ... and here is the caramel top and fill.
Now don't get me wrong you can make dulce de leche from
a tin of sweetened condensed milk it's been done many times before.
Some people like to put an unopened can in a pan of water covering the can with
water and boil it for a long time. The problem with that method is if you
forget about it on the stovetop and the water gets low,
the can's going to explode as Theresa G found out.
"I just had an explosion!" "It sounded like a bomb going off ...
oh I gotta clean up a big mess!" Just as well she wasn't
near that when it exploded or she would have had hot caramel all over it so
don't do that method! What you can do is open the can and put
some foil over the top and pull it down really
tightly give it a good tight seal and then put that in a water bath
obviously not covering the top because the foil would let the water in
just about two-thirds the way up the can with the water and either put it in the
oven or in your slow cooker and it's again
got to be cooked for quite a long time so you do want to keep an eye on it and
make sure you keep topping up the water and that way as well you can take off
the fall and check how dark your caramel color is and stop cooking it when it's
how you like it. Now moving on to the next one you may
remember in a previous video the recipe that i looked at and debunked
that was marshmallows and eggs in a milk carton and both So Yummy and
Five Minute Crafts had done it but in the So Yummy video you could clearly
see they'd cut the bottom off the milk carton. Five Minute Crafts hadn't done
that the recipe didn't work regardless of which way you did it but
i found it fascinating this week that i found
a new recipe of five minute crafts where they're doing the same
recipe. So I thought let's see if they've improved it and see what they've
done. so if we watch that you can see they're
adding the marshmallows and an egg another egg giving it a shake
and then they're putting it in the microwave so the recipe is exactly the
same ...this is still not going to work and then if you look at the before and after
footage of before it went in the microwave and
after you can see they've now cut it off at the bottom as well.
So we can see the recipe is clearly fake because they've cut the milk carton in
half i just think that's bizarre that you would
copy what someone else had done to the extreme of cutting a milk carton in half.
This is a problem with misinformation and in this case disinformation ...
"Disinformation is is deliberate falsehood it's the
fabrication of information, done in such a way that it's not
immediately recognizable to you or to me necessarily."
If everyone's copying everyone else the wrong information just gets repeated and
repeated and repeated and then often people who are just watching it
think that must be right because it's on multiple sources and multiple channels.
Let's move on in this video they take oreo scraps
and crush them put them in a cup fill it with milk and microwave for four
minutes and you get an easy mug cake. well let me test that one out shall we?
So we'll start off with some oreos it looks like on their's they have
one, two, three, if we add those together and
then their little bits make four oreos ... so we'll crush those up
and scoop them into my cup. hmm can you spot a problem here?
My cup is nearly empty and so is theirs but then in the very next shot theirs is
magically full 🤔 Clearly i don't have enough oreos in my
cup so let me add some more. I'm gonna need an extra one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven ...
that looks about right but plus the original four that makes 11 oreos that's
nearly a whole packet! this better be for a whole family not
just for one person to eat fill that with milk and microwave for
four minutes. Ta-dah! "Oh bring the cup to me...
magnificent! I love what you've done with it. Is this one of those in-a-cup,
you know like is the idea you serve it in a mug? Most of it's in the microwave.
"I'll just go deep deep into the Dagobah System..." "It's actually okay." Well at least it
tasted okay... now this recipe all started from a viral
Tik Tok video where a girl took four Oreos and mixed
it with enough milk to make quite a thick sludge there wasn't heaps of milk
in there and then microwaved it to make a small cake.
So you can make this work you just have to remember to only use
four oreos don't fill the cup with them, don't fill the cup with milk
and don't expect it to be a full cup of cake because that's not going to happen
with this recipe it's going to be a little bit down the bottom of your cup
if you've got a big cup. In the same video they tip a brownie mix
into a paper bag and then sprinkle on some
nuts, fold over the top and microwave for 10
minutes to make lovely looking brownies.
Now you should know by now how i feel about microwaving anything for 10
minutes! Unless it's a frozen meal that's big and
solidly frozen you're going to be in trouble ... 10 minutes
is just too long in the microwave but anyway I will test it and see what
happens. Pour the brownie mix into the bag
sprinkle on the nuts fold it down and again
and then microwave it for 10 minutes. That is smoke not steam just give me a
second oh that smells so bad my whole kitchen
stinks... let's open this up. You might notice here
that I've got a small layer of brownie stuck to my bag which is what you'd
expect if you're baking on paper that's not nonstick but in
their video the bag is perfectly clean ... it's as if the brownie was put in the
bag after baking elsewhere. Mine doesn't look too bad on the outside,
well, it doesn't look good either but if I
smell it or cut into it you can clearly see that
it is badly burnt 🥵 Wow it's metamorphosized into charcoal! "Ugh ... wow, need a water!" Okay let's have a
look how five-minute crafts choose to bake their brownies if you don't have an
oven. Well they use an eraser to make a
mini cute little foil baking tin and fill it with brownie mixture and
then they put it on a hair straightener. and it bakes and then they've obviously
repeated that a couple more times so that they have three tiny
little not very good-looking brownies... I guess i have to test it and see what's
gonna happen hey. I've made my eraser-sized tin out of foil,
add in the brownie mixture and carefully put that onto the hot hair straightener
so i don't burn my fingers and start a timer. Now i'm going to have
to fast forward this for you... and 15 minutes later you have
one brownie. So it's probably not the most energy efficient way to cook them
and i'm not sure about the safety of leaving the hair straightener on for
long enough to cook multiple of these but of course it does work because the
hair straightener is a heat source, it is hot.
They are a little bit overcooked at the bottom and still sticky on top as you'd
expect because the heat source was directly on the base.
You'd have to be pretty desperate to cook brownies on a hair straightener
but who knows people might be in lockdown with no ovens, no microwaves.
Let me know what you would do if you were trying to cook
brownies yourself at home and you had no oven, no microwave what would be
your idea. Put that in the comments and i'll pin the best suggestion.
Next video they grab an orange and cut off the top, scoop all the orange
out and add an egg and another one
and a little bit of milk stir it up and bake. Wow well it looks alright at the end but
I'm just a bit confused what they're trying to make here? Like it
looks like it should be a dessert to me that looks like it should be an orange
creme brulee but if you're making that you'd need to
add some sugar at least preferably leave the egg whites out and add a little bit
more cream in there so you've just got the milk cream egg yolks a bit of sugar
and the orange flavor from the orange on the outside that
sounds really yummy but this has no sugar in it so it's clearly not what
they were going for they weren't doing a dessert
so then it's more like quiche filling but with
no savory elements to it so that's really
weird recipe. I'm definitely making this for dave to try 💕
Cut the top off the orange it's actually really hard to get the orange
out when you've only got this little bit cut off the top
and i don't want to put a hole in my orange because we've got to bake it in
the oven so i've got to be super careful. I remember my mum used to have a
grapefruit knife that was like curved that might help with this.
My mum lives in a different State so let me just go to my garage and bend my
knife... there we go! One curved grapefruit knife
that works much better to cut it around the edge and then scrape it all out with
the spoon, then pretend that that was really easy
add an egg and another then a little bit of milk. Now i think my
orange is smaller than theirs or my eggs are bigger because
it's a bit too full and it's impossible to beat the eggs effectively inside the
orange so i'm going to tip the whole thing into a bowl whisk it up
and then tip it back in but i'm not going to add all of it
back in i'm just going to fill it to the same level as their
orange was just to be fair and then bake that in the oven.
Wow it overflowed... we have this eggy mixture everywhere so
i'm just going to get rid of that and move it to one side,
there that actually looks okay. Here we go...
"Wooo ... I'm gonna flip the lid and uh in we go ... it actually looks kind
of cool. looking forward to this one.
That is not what I expected at all! What were you expecting?
Uh something like sweet and nice and uh ..." Like an orange custard? "Yeah
something orangey maybe you know they kind of related to the..."
What did it taste like? "Oh it tastes like an omelette. It's like an omelette in an
orange wow that's what I want!" Moving on to the
next one that you sent me which is this one by five minute crafts...
they draw a circle the size of a lid on the top of their watermelon and then
tip in two bottles of soft drink so that it
goes into the watermelon and then when you cut it open i assume
it's supposed to taste of coke they don't actually say we can't really tell
from the girl's expression but i assume that's what they're going for.
We'll give it a try and see what happens. Cut a hole in the middle of my
watermelon... I'm going to put the watermelon on top
of the Coke so I can tip it up without spilling it
and then tip it over... no quick grab a cloth it's
fizzing everywhere nope it's going on me! I don't want it on the cameras. Oh no
we're basically just emptying a bottle of coke onto the bench
because it's just reacting with the watermelon and
fizzing everywhere. Attempt number two this time i'm going to make the holes
much smaller so as you can see that's quite a bit smaller than that one
and then i'm going to add some sugar into the soft drink to make it flat so
it doesn't fizz when it hits the watermelon. I've
added heaps and heaps of paper towel
underneath it as well just in case and we have it
in let's put another half bottle of flat soda in the other side.
Screw that in there nice and tight and see if i can get it to balance ...
there we go. Now this is actually a time lapse of
photos, one photo taken every minute over seven hours!
And as you can see the drink is going down but i think
it's all going down to the paper towel because the paper towel is getting
wetter and wetter as the drink slowly drips down the
outside of the melon. So as you can see coke doesn't just pour
into a watermelon like it did on their video...
their first bottle was nearly empty before they even managed to get the
second bottle on there so we know it's not a time lapse they filmed that in
real time. The only way that could have happened is
if they've carved out the back of the watermelon and they've got a bowl
sitting under there for that coke just to pour into.
For those of you who are a bit skeptical of that and you think well they can't
have because in the next shot they've got a whole watermelon there and you can
see the holes cut in it... let me show you the watermelon from
before ... and the watermelon from after. I think they switched watermelons
on us what do you think? Well let's check on
the melon that we had marinating in that soft drink for all
that time. You can see here how much drink has just
leaked onto the bench it is just literally dripping it's just drenched
it's another mess for me to clean up debunking is so fun!
Now let's cut this thing open you can see a
little bit of discoloration right where the bottle was but not
very much at all. In the center hole i poked a skewer right down to see if i
could encourage the coke to go in but it just didn't work i'll cut a bit
from the very edge section and see if Dave can taste anything
different, it certainly doesn't look appetizing. "It's like you took a good watermelon
and wrecked it." Next we have this one from Tastemade that someone sent me in
to test... so we've got a whole new channel that we
haven't had on debunking before. They brown these bananas in the oven,
peel them scoop out the middle, put it into a blender,
add some milk, blend that up and then pour it into molds, refrigerate
it and then tip out a set molded dessert.
Now i know this looks impossible because there's no gelatin you'd think there's
nothing to make it set but bananas are particularly high in
starch and if you heat starch up it does
thicken things. if you have a sauce on the stovetop and
you need it to be thicker you can add a bit of rice flour or a bit of normal
flour, a bit of corn flour and you mix that through and as the
starch granules burst it thickens up the sauce and then if you
refrigerate that if you've added enough flour it will kind of gel together a bit
like that. so the question is will the bananas be
enough to set it like that? i'm not sure what it's going to taste
like mind you... so we'll test all of that out and see.
Put the bananas in the oven until the skin is black, peel the banana,
scoop out the flesh. Now it is worth noting here that as a banana ripens some
of the starch in it turns to sugar that's why it gets sweeter the riper it
is so the more ripe the banana is the less
starch will be in it so it won't be as good at setting this
dessert. Blend it up and then pour that into molds. Now my
mixture looks a bit thicker than theirs is. I did add milk to the exact same
volume that they had on their blender but perhaps
my bananas were not as ripe as theirs or maybe they added
more milk off camera, I'm not sure. We'll refrigerate those for 30 minutes
and there you have a set dessert. then they added cream to the top of that
and chocolate sauce. Taste Test Time!
"Oh wow this one actually looks good, thanks Ann ...
see she does look after me! All right so uh it's got a fair amount of liquid down
the bottom a little bit weirded out by that but i'm
going to give it a go because you know I can trust you 😉 Oh it's just so disappointing ...
it's like, it's kind of like baby food it's like a banana gloop!
I wonder if you added a little bit more sweetness to that whether it would taste
a lot better. It is interesting though that they've used the bananas to set it
I think that's a creative way of doing it and
certainly if you're a vegan this is a good thing to explore because
obviously if you don't want to use gelatin it's good to have some other
things that you can use to set a dessert so give that a go experiment see if you
can come up with your own recipe there using that as a base to make it set.
Next i thought i'd do a couple of hacks that
technically do work but really annoy me. I just
don't like them, they frustrate me because i think there's an easier way to
do them so I'm like isn't the whole purpose of a
hack to make it easy! The first one I'm going to show you
is cutting a cake into two layers using
toothpicks so they measure the cake the whole way around
and add a toothpick at the exact same height all the way around the cake which
just takes forever in real time then add the dental floss around resting
on top of the toothpicks and then pull that tight to cut the cake
into two layers and yes it does do the job but i just
don't think it's the best way to do the job so i thought i'd share
with you my hack for what i do if i need to do this.
Have a look at your cake measure where halfway up is and grab something that is
that height. Lids are a good place to look in
your kitchen cupboard first and then grab a knife and rest it across
so that it's resting on both sides of the lid that will keep
your blade level and flat and then you just cut
gently turning your cake as you go and it is
quick and simple and you have a beautifully cut cake you didn't have to
put toothpicks the whole way around and then you can also just easily repeat
that with the top of the cake just to flatten off the top so that you
end up with two layers that are exactly the same
height and perfectly done there much quicker than doing it the other way.
Now also if i zoom in and show you here are two that are cut
with toothpicks and the dental floss and here are the perfectly smooth and flat
one done with the knife obviously because the
knife is a lot sharper. Now this next one this is just
weird to me. I don't get what they were thinking
but they have a whole big bowl of lentils that they're trying to tip
into a little narrow jar and it's spilling everywhere so they take a
bottle and they cut it out to make a scoop
shape and then the scoop is so awkwardly shaped that they can only get
the equivalent of one tablespoon at a time and tip it into their jar so you
could have just used a normal spoon. Now quite honestly number one who has
lentils in a big bowl that they need to tip into a jar they usually come in a
bag and you can just pour it into the jar but let's pretend
that you do have something in a big bowl that you want to get into
a narrow vessel. Wouldn't it make more sense
to take your empty bottle and cut off the whole top of the bottle
and then put that on top of your jar and tip your lentils in
into your homemade funnel? Well that's enough hack improving and debunking for
one day. I'd like to say thank you to all my
patrons for your ongoing support you guys are
absolutely awesome. Click here to watch more of my videos and you can of course
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Make it a great week by loving others and i'll see you on Friday.
Anyone on the fence: this series is very good, and all of them are worth a watch.
Don’t judge it by the thumb or the title. It’s meant to be approachable to people who watch the videos they’re debunking.
Oh my god the reveal of the Oreo mug cake nearly killed me.
I'm too humiliated to bake.
This is a great channel! I recommend browsing around.
To be fair... They used smaller cola bottles in the original video. /s
Big fan of her debunking videos.