I tried making the popular TikTok ‘cloud bread’ and it went horribly wrong

TikTok has been a saviour during the entirety of lockdown, there is no doubt about it. We have seen some amazing, weird and questionable trends come out of the app. But the most intriguing one by far is the TikTok “cloud bread” that people have been making all across my For You Page. It’s essentially somewhere between a really, really soft loaf bread and a really hard meringue. It sounded really good so, like any sane person in living in the midst of a global pandemic, I tried to make it myself. Spoiler: It was fucking awful and a waste of my time.

The intention behind this whole thing was to do a step-by-step guide on how to successfully make the TikTok cloud bread which you’ll soon realise that I am evidently incapable of doing. Do you want to know what the saddest part of all this is? I genuinely tried and put in the actual effort but it came out looking like a thick yoga mat.

The recipe is here and so is every questionable thing I did that could have led to the horrendous end result. But for legitimate reference, here’s the TikTok I followed to make my very sub-par TikTok cloud bread.

Your ingredients list

Thankfully this trend doesn’t take much time or effort and the ingredients list is quite basic. What you will need is:

• Three eggs

• Sugar

• Cornstarch

Also, blue food colouring and vanilla essence but these are both optional.

Separate the egg yolks from the eggs whites

This is something that I have never experienced doing before. It’s an absolute yolk how messy this part actually was. Although saying that, this was probably the only part to baking the bread which I can safely say I did correctly.

You then have to whip the egg whites until they become foamy. The TikTokker I saw do this recommended an electric whisk but my mum didn’t trust me for some reason so a hand whisk is what I had to make do with.

Add in your sugar

Once the eggs are nice and foamed, add in your 30g of sugar and mix it in nicely. This part was fairly easy and the sugar mixed in pretty well. It left me feeling quite confident knowing that I did the first two steps perfectly with no issues at all.

Plop in the cornstarch

Arguably this is where it all went a bit tits up for me and my confidence was shattered into a million pieces. I used cornflour instead of cornstarch and that could be where it went wrong. But admittedly there were other instances in this step where things went a bit wrong.

The video I was following said to add 10g of cornflour which is basically one tablespoon. Naturally, like any good baker, I added the required amount of cornflour and started mixing. This did change the consistency but nowhere near enough. It’s meant to become stiff and mine was still really runny. My solution? Adding seven more heaps of cornflour until I added approximately half of the 500g box. After this, I also tipped in some blue food coloring because I thought it would be really cute. It wasn’t cute.

It was still anything but stiff and I was literally sweating from whisking so hardcore.

ThE FLaVoUR wILL sAvE iT

After the cornflour shit show I was bagging on the vanilla extract doing something to help. There was no measurement for this, but the person I saw make the bread added like a dash of it. I added around half a shot but I couldn’t taste anything beyond disappointment when it came out of the oven.

TikTok cloud bread has GOT to be stiff

What I learned from TikTok at this stage is that if it doesn’t fall out of the bowl onto your head then you have done it right. This was like a big trust test on myself, it is safe to say this stage was something that I was just not prepared to try. Considering that my “cloud bread” mixture was still significant runny, I wasn’t going to bother doing this.

At this point I was sweating, tired, aching and just pissed off.

Scrape it out of the bowl onto the baking tray

Making sure the tray was lined with baking paper, I poured it out. In theory, it’s meant to be really thick so you can mould it into the shape of bread. But in this case,  it just took the shape of the baking tray and became a really flat rectangle.

Great.

Oven time

So the oven setting was an issue. I have only seen American’s do this and they said 300 degrees for 25 minutes. But obviously the standard English oven goes up to 220 degrees so I was cautious about this. I put trust in myself, turned the oven on at 180 degrees, and popped the tray of Smurf snot in for about 30 minutes.

I was going to say something here to insult everyone who preheats an oven, calling them a loser or something. But in hindsight, not preheating the oven could be another aspect where it went wrong.

The taste test

Throughout the entirety of this TikTok cloud bread baking session, I kept telling myself to trust the process. Now I can say, hand on heart, the process is a load of shit and I’m never trusting it again. The expectation I had was that it was going to be really blue and fluffy but instead it was flat, dry, and tasted similar to how I imagine a dirty sock tasting. Where was the vanilla, I hear you ask? Fuck knows.

It looked like a PE mat that had been skinned of its blue plastic coat after being stomped all over by kids with verrucas.

It’s safe to say that I will never be participating in bringing TikTok’s popular creations to life again.

Featured image via @cookingwithhel and… me. 

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