【Swipe (2017)】

I recently visited my local nail salon for a relaxing day of self-care,Swipe (2017) but things got a bit stressful when the nail technician went to town on my cuticles. To distract myself from the slight pain, I looked up at the TV screens mounted on the wall, and that's when I found a brand new source of calm.

The salon was playing a compilation following the trend of oddly satisfying, ASMR videos: Cookie decorating videos.

I was instantly transfixed — both by the sheer amount of skill and technique of the pastry artists, and the curiosity of how the cookie design itself would evolve as they deftly filled in the icing.

For whatever reason, when I need to give my mind a breather, ASMR-inducing videos of someone cutting soap or folding paint until the colors blend together just do not do it for me. But what doessoothe me more than anything else are timelapse baking videos.

Having worked for a year in a bakery, I also understand how much love and effort is put into every piece of fondant and every dot of icing. Maybe that's why cookie videos just seem so much warmer to me than slime.

However, cookie art and decorating videos fit into a unique niche of being cooking-adjacent. Watching popular channels such as Amazing Cookies and Awesome Cookie are closer to watching Bob Ross paint a landscape using only buttercream and royal icing than Julia Child cooking a chicken.

The canvas of a cookie is small, so every inch must be used wisely. Icing has to flood, fill, and set before the next step. There are layers of creativity and technique in decorating a cookie — the slow process and incremental build-up to something that looks beautiful, but isn't necessarily delicious.

Many of the designs are made with royal icing (a mixture of powdered sugar and egg whites) giving the cookies their glossy sheen, but this doesn't exactly translate to big flavor.

Instead of oil paints and charcoal, the medium is icing and food coloring. And there's something inspiring about watching intricate designs unfold onscreen, knowing they were made with only metal tools and a piping bag.

For me, watching these compilations is like strolling through a museum — a calming appreciation of art. You can look, but don't touch — or in this case, don't eat.

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