Kate bakes mini lasagna in a mini kitchen
Every day, one hundred thousand people from all over the world watch Kate Murdoch’s online cooking show. Yet she isn’t recognized on the street, because only her hands are shown as she bakes tiny French toast and makes mini lasagna in her Tiny Kitchen.
How did she come up with the idea? In Japan, small and cute has been a trend for quite some time. It’s called kawai, and adults are possibly even more enthusiastic about it than children. Food channel Tastemade also wanted to do something with the kawai trend, so they asked Kate to come up with something together with her brother. ‘It seemed a little strange to me,’ says Kate Murdoch. ‘But after I had watched all these videos on YouTube of people making mini mac and cheese and small hamburgers, I was sold.’ Her own YouTube channel, Tiny Kitchen, now has 159,000 followers, and videos featuring spaghetti with meatballs, fried onion rings and even a miniature wedding cake attract hundreds of thousands of viewers.
On a tealight
A tiny set was built in the television studio, and Kate was given a little stove at home to practise with. ‘The stove burns on a tealight,’ she explains. ‘It goes very quickly because we work with such small quantities. A little pan of water boils in less than a minute, and small hamburgers only need to be cooked for a few seconds on each side.’
Mini vegetables
The ingredients in the kitchen have been adapted to miniature size. Kate uses quail eggs instead of regular eggs, and before filming begins, she cuts the vegetables so they look like the real deal. ‘Once, I made a piping bag from the tip of a plastic bag to decorate a cake,’ she says. ‘It’s really fun to make those little things yourself.’
Not everything works in miniature. ‘I tried making cream puffs, but you have to fill them afterwards too, and I haven’t managed that yet. I’ll keep trying. And I’d love to make a small Christmas dinner, but I really don’t know where we could find a turkey in the right size.’
