Facebook Test Kitchen:“The Fudgiest Dairy-Free Brownie Pie”

Is it REALLY the fudgiest, though?

I know Facebook has become insidiously necessary to the structure of our lives but I’d given up on deriving any actual enjoyment from it. Until I was caught unawares, by faceless, quick-cut cooking videos. The sort that jump from ingredient to ingredient thrown in a pan or a mixing bowl, with no narration or view of the person making it. When I first started food blogging, the dominant cooking video style was cute, talky videos with lots of explanation and personality, that really guided you through every single step. Nowadays my attention span is so fried that if I suspect there’s even a hint of exposition in a cooking video I’ll immediately scroll past it. I want cakes expertly decorated, life hacks dispensed rapidly, ingredients rolled up and stuffed into each other without being told why, and I want lots of them.

I’m not actually necessarily transfixed by these videos because of my love of cooking, I watch because I find them so, so calming. And, it turns out, so do lots of people! Even my dad, who would never sit down to view a cooking show on TV, agreed with me about how strangely compelling these videos are. Is it because as humans we’re drawn to displays of competency? Is that the videos give us hope for our own achievements with their simplicity? Is it…