Posted on Feb 10, 2021

People On TikTok Are Obsessed With This 20-Year-Old Chef Who Makes Food Emojis In Real Life

You ~donut~ wanna miss this 🍩.

Liz Richardson

by Liz Richardson

BuzzFeed Staff

Like most people, I'm a fan of using emojis while texting. And, hey, I'll throw in a food emoji every now and then.

Netflix

Because what's "Taco Tuesday" without the 🌮?

But have you ever stopped and asked yourself: "I wonder what these food emojis would look (and taste) like in real life?"

A stock photo of a guy thinking while texting next to a thought bubble that has a pizza emoji and a question mark

Well, meet 20-year-old Ash Baber. With nearly 780,000 followers on TikTok, he's been going viral for feeding everyone's curiosity and re-creating emoji foods in real life.

Instagram

A university student from Greater Manchester, Ash has been sharing cooking videos on TikTok since 2019, but he started posting more consistently in March 2020 when the UK went into lockdown.

Instagram

Ash's viral emoji foods series began recently when he was inspired to re-create the birthday cake emoji for a video. "Randomly at 2 a.m., I thought of the idea of making the birthday cake emoji just because if you look at it, you'll realize that it's a strange emoji — it doesn't really make sense," he told BuzzFeed.

TikToker Ash Baber with his birthday cake emoji creation next to him cutting into the cake

In the video, which now has over 3.1 million views, Ash takes viewers through his process of making the entire cake from start to finish.

@ashbaber
birthday cake emoji......cake 😌 #fy #foodtiktok #cake #baking #learnontiktok
♬ Cinnamon Bun - Prod by Rose

"Do you know the birthday cake emoji? I wanted to see what it would look like in real life, because I am confused. Like, they just put regular candles — just the ones you put on a table on top of this cake — and no one on the Apple team questioned it?" Ash jokes in the video.

Ash smooths the cake during the video then places raspberries on top

To finish it off, he tops the cake with the raspberries and those regular-sized candles (instead of birthday candles) to replicate the ones on the actual emoji. 🎂

The birthday cake emoji next to it in real life with giant candles

After the birthday cake TikTok blew up, followers asked him to make the cupcake emoji. So, of course, he did it:

Instagram

As fun as the foods look, Ash revealed that re-creating them is actually "a lot harder" than people think. According to him, some can take one to two hours to make, while others can take four or five hours just to get the details right.

A cupcake being iced next to tweezers putting on sprinkles on the icing one by one

Nevertheless, the hard work is paying off. Each creation comes out incredibly accurate.

The cupcake emoji next to its real-life replica, which pretty much exactly the same

Here's Ash's video re-creating the donut emoji 🍩 — which he says was one of his favorites to make:

Instagram

"The cupcake and donut emoji, you wouldn't expect them to take that long, but they actually did because of the way the emoji was created. The sprinkle placement on the emojis is very specific, and I wanted to replicate that, so I stood in my kitchen placing sprinkles on one by one."

Four donuts, also with accurately placed sprinkles, from the donut TikTok video

Four cupcakes with perfectly placed sprinkles from the cupcake emoji TikTok video

"It's become a series, which I did not expect at all. I thought I was just going to post the video then move on, but the whole comment section on each emoji video I do is recommending other emojis they want to see me re-create." Since the success of Ash's series, he's gone on to replicate several other foods, including the pretzel emoji 🥨:

The pretzel emoji next to a freshly-made pretzel

The boba emoji:

The boba emoji next to a delicious-looking real-life boba

The pancake emoji — which Ash says was surprisingly the "hardest" to make:

The pancake emoji next to a real stack of pancakes that even has an identical block of butter on top

The dango — a Japanese snack — emoji, which only took him an hour:

The colorful dango emoji next to its identical real-life creation

And the croissant emoji — which, according to Ash, took ~three days~, the longest time to make:

The croissant emoji next to it's freshly-baked real-life version

People have been loving Ash's series, and as a food lover himself, he enjoys making the content. "I don't have intentions to re-create every food emoji because there are so many...but I will keep going as long as people keep watching!"

Ash holds his emoji food creations in two different videos: the pretzel emoji and the dango emoji

To keep up with Ash's food emoji series and his other cooking videos, be sure to follow him on TikTok @ashbaber and Instagram @ash_baber!

Which food creation is your favorite? Which emoji would you like to see next? Let me know in the comments below!

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