I feel like I need to talk to someone about the struggles of browsing Pinterest for snack ideas, and because no one I talk to has any interest in listening to my seriously first world problems, I figured I’d just write about it and you guys can read it at your leisure (or not, but I’m going to write it anyway). So obviously Pinterest is great, not only as a tool of procrastination, for which I use it quite frequently, but also for browsing geeky fandom stuff, finding hilarious memes to send to my sister, and, of course, to browse recipes.
Sometimes I go on Pinterest looking for a specific type of snack recipe (I’ve made some wicked good cookies from recipes I’ve found on Pinterest), but other times I’m just scrolling innocently and come upon the most beautiful-looking snack recipe that I would absolutely destroy if I ever were to try it. We’ve all been there, right? We see, like, little Santas that can (apparently) be made from little more than whipped cream and a strawberry (see right … still not convinced those are real).
Or tiny penguins that can (allegedly) be made with cream cheese, carrots, and olives. And you look at these little creations and think that they’re just the most delightful things on the planet, and wouldn’t that just be the best thing to bring to your friend’s place on Friday, and you for some reason are infected by a surge of confidence and think that surely these can’t be as difficult to made as the last Pinterest recipe you tried … and then it is, and you’re ready to call an airport shuttle service to get you to a plane and out of the country as soon as possible so you don’t die of embarrassment in front of your friends.
I remember around Hallowe’en I was going over to a friend’s place to watch Harry Potter movies, and I decided to bring over little spider cookies. They looked simple-enough; they were just little drop cookies with bits of Pull ’N’ Peel licorice sticking out of them for legs. How hard could it possibly be? Needless to say, it was a disaster, and basically we mostly just ate the extra licorice that I bundled up and brought over.
And that’s not my only Pinterest struggle. There’s a constant battle between the light side and the dark side of my eating habits whenever I scroll, because I am regularly bombarded with two completely contradictory messages. On one side of the page, I have a recipe for frozen yogurt droplets, advertised as nature’s healthy, anti-oxidant-filled, bursting-with-goodness gumdrops. Great. Look delicious.
But right beside that, I’m assaulted by a recipe for THE BEST DOUBLE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES OF YOUR LIFE (usually in caps, to emphasize just how extra-divine these cookies will be). I mean … sure, the yogurt drops look yummy. But they’re also something new I have to learn how to make, and they look labour-intensive. But then there’s those cookies. I mean … I’m only human, after all! I’m a mere mortal, and I am instinctively drawn to the cookies.
I think, too, that there’s something to be said about the above paragraph’s problem having a major influence on what I try to make, because the exciting healthy options usually look like something I could totally botch and, in turn, waste a ton of relatively expensive ingredients on. The struggle to find a happy medium between snickerdoodles and celery sticks is real.
All that said, long live Pinterest. May your collections of corgi pictures and Harry Potter quotes always be available to me when I should be doing something more important.
It’s stuff like these owl cookies, that look easy-enough to make, that will likely destroy us in the end. But here’s a video anyway. Good luck.