the baking life

New York Pastry Chef Defends Elizabeth Warren’s Strawberry-Shortcake Post

Earlier this week, Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren posted a photo of a homemade strawberry shortcake that wasn’t going to win any awards on The Great British Baking Show. Whatever, she was making it with her grandson, and she’s got shit to do. Some on the internet decided to lampoon the senator’s baking skills: The website Twitchy wrote about it twice, noting that the photo had become something of a meme, and people critiqued its aesthetics, causing a New York pastry chef to roll his eyes into the back of his head.

In the world according to Instagram, all food is perfectly stretched cheese, slack noodles dripping with sauce over a bowl, flawlessly constructed cakes with frosting that’s just so, and pies with lattice crusts intricate enough for the court at Versailles. In reality, our food looks more like Martha Stewart’s feed and … Warren’s imperfect shortcake. Gramercy Tavern and Untitled pastry chef Miro Uskokovic knows that. Yesterday, he posted Warren’s shortcake with a long caption about the silliness of this, pointing out that everyone just posts “the most flattering and manicured pictures of our food and ourselves,” but that “shit happens.” Even Uskokovic, one of the city’s most talented pastry chefs, says he had a pastry fail “just last week,” when his project turned into a “soupy hot mess.” Also, as he points out, Warren is kind of busy going after monopolies.

Pastry Chef Defends Warren’s Strawberry-Shortcake Post