After spending so much time watching Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos on Facebook, I decided to actually try to make one with a friend. The results were…interesting.
I chose Tasty’s Banana French Toast Bake to make with my co-chef, Makia Hall. We’ve baked together before and have made some horrible mistakes (like leaving out an egg and an entire cup of flour in a cupcake recipe), so we were sure to be extra careful with this recipe and followed the directions as closely as possible.
The dish itself doesn’t look too hard in the video, but the actual page with the recipe conflicts with the video. Since the link to the recipe wouldn’t work on my phone, I had to use the video as my grocery list. The video calls for 10 cups of bread (yes, you read that right), so I bought a large loaf of white bread. About halfway through making the recipe, we noticed that the written out recipe calls for one loaf of French bread. By the time we noticed, it was too late.
The first part of the recipe was making the banana-brown sugar glaze. This was pretty straightforward and we had no technical problems. The recipe didn’t tell us what type of brown sugar to use and we only had dark, so that’s what we used. It looks like they used light in the video, but our substitution wouldn’t have made too much of a difference.
After making the glaze, Makia worked on cutting 10 cups worth of bread while I cracked eight eggs. If it sounds like10 cups of bread and eight eggs are absurd amounts that’s because they are. Makia had to keep grabbing bowls from my cupboard to fill with bread and my hands were quickly covered with egg. By the end of it all, we were in disbelief by the amount of cubed bread and by the deepness of the eggs in the mixing bowl. It was actually kind of disgusting, but it got worse once we finished making the custard and added the bread.
The reason why you are supposed to use French bread became pretty obvious when the liquid quickly consumed the bread. We had to cut more to try to have a decent balance between the two components, but we had to leave it a little soggy to prevent a bread overload.
While we made the bread-custard, the banana-brown sugar glaze sat on the stovetop. I occasionally stirred it to prevent it from separating, and I noticed it got a little mushy. There were a lot of issues with mushiness with this recipe, but had we used French bread, the custard might not have been as soggy. Making the glaze last might have been a better option if we had made the recipe with French bread. Either way, this recipe is high-risk for being soggy.
After we layered together the dish, we popped it in the oven for 45 minutes. When we checked on it after the timer went off, it looked like it was going to bubble over. It still didn’t look done, so we added five minutes a couple of times before taking it out. When my mom baked a couple of pies the next day, we found out that our bake spilled over a little bit, but we didn’t notice at the time.
The banana french toast bake smelled pretty good, but we were still a little nervous about trying it. Makia and I both love French toast and like bananas, but after seeing the process and all of those eggs, we weren’t sure if it would live up to our original expectations. Still, after letting it cool, we decided to try our creation.
There were mixed reactions. My mom and I did not like the bake, but my sister liked it and Makia loved it. In fact, Makia ate nearly half of the pan! I found the bake to be a little bland and mushy, but I didn’t think it was horrible. I’m not sure if I would make this particular recipe again, but if I did, I would definitely make a few changes.
Tasty videos are fun to watch, but aren’t as simple as they seem. The recipe I tried out wasn’t even very complex, but it was still a lot harder to make than the video made it seem. I can’t imagine how difficult the recipes that actually look hard would be. I probably won’t try another Tasty recipe out for a while. If I do try one again, I’ll definitely pick out an even simpler one that doesn’t have eggs or bread.