I have finally mastered a TikTok recipe for bao buns – but they take almost five hours | Zoe Williams

What am I doing with my one wild and precious life? Struggling to follow fast, frantic cookery instructions and developing a whole new swearing habit

I have been following the rise of the bao bun very keenly - the pallid little puffballs are enjoying a boom in Britain's snack sector - on account of the fact that I learned to make them myself. It took me a long time and made me question a lot of things, including my soundness of mind. For anyone without teenagers in their house, there is a new frontier in knowledge exchange, which is the TikTok recipe. It's like a regular recipe, except with a twist: it's also like the world's hardest IQ test.

The posters are mainly American and the dishes are mainly Korean (or air-fryer-based). The TikTokkers will tell you in broad terms what the ingredients are, but incredibly fast and often with swearing. Think of the craft segments on Blue Peter - painstakingly described, with one they made earlier - then make it 150 times faster and much bluer.