TikTok Is Unimpressed By This M&M's Red Velvet Cake Hack
With the amount of attention food hacks receive on the internet, it is inevitable that some attempts won't cut it. This happened to Eitan Bernath, a TikToker whose brand is built upon hacks and strange recipes.
On September 12, Bernath uploaded a video of his take on red velvet cake. Its beginning is visually striking enough. He cracks a few eggs into a bowl of M&M's, then mixes in water and oil. However, as the recipe continues, its more basic elements come to the fore. He takes out a box of cake mix, dumps it into the bowl, and continues to make a cake that just happens to have M&M's inside it.
"This is just making a regular box cake mix and adding M&M's," one wrote. In fact, as another noted, it probably would have made more sense to add the M&M's to the mix instead. That way you would not have little bits of candy obstructing the mixing of the cake elements.
The accident of the social media grind
The stranger aspect of Eitan Bernath's attempt to mix things up with the M&M's red velvet cake is that the entire recipe he follows is very basic. This is made clear by actual box cake hacks written in HuffPost. Bernath pours water and oil over the eggs and M&M's. These, though, can be substituted with butter, milk, and coffee. These switches make the resulting cake denser, richer, and better tasting. Moreover, as his rhubarb crumb cake recipe shows, Bernath knows this.
It seems more likely, then, that the point of the video was to begin with the rather arresting image of eggs and M&M's. In fact, many responded to the image, calling it "cursed." If the rest of the recipe is a bit of a dud, well, no matter. Bernath's job is primarily to pump out content and content he pumped out. Our reaction is besides the point.