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.
But have you ever stopped and asked yourself: "I wonder what these food emojis would look (and taste) like in real life?"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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. 🎂
After the birthday cake TikTok blew up, followers asked him to make the cupcake emoji. So, of course, he did it:
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.
Nevertheless, the hard work is paying off. Each creation comes out incredibly accurate.
Here's Ash's video re-creating the donut emoji 🍩 — which he says was one of his favorites to make:
"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."
"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 boba emoji:
The pancake emoji — which Ash says was surprisingly the "hardest" to make:
The dango — a Japanese snack — emoji, which only took him an hour:
And the croissant emoji — which, according to Ash, took ~three days~, the longest time to make:
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!"
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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