Meghan Markle's As Ever Crêpes
Come to the dark side... we have cookies with edible flowers
Ugh
I meant to post last week
Sometimes my time management is like that of the toxically-queer person in your office. But the bosses over at Celebrity Skin Contact Corp. don’t believe in mental health days.
No - Meghan Markle is not making wine (yet) but this felt like an essential brand to review. However, I really don’t care about Mrs. Sussex. I am at best agnostic and at worst feel bad for her. I don’t get what she did wrong other than be annoying. Now Princess Diana? She was a bitch. I remember we’d be in the car and she’d roll all the windows up and fart and then blame it on me.
Now that I think about it, there’s something very queer about Meghan’s culinary brand, As Ever. That it has a dead name (American Riviera Orchard), that it took several years to rest and take care of itself after making a single batch of jam for 50 people.
Because of this, I was worried about getting Fyre Fest-ed. I was sure that I would place my order — one shortbread cookie mix, one crêpe kit, totaling $34 with shipping — and then it would never arrive. And I can’t afford to get scammed. I mean, my not-cancelled government contract to write these semi-frequent blog posts is only $2 million!
But no: “a little joy” was at my house in four days time (which was shipped from an address in Cincinnati, oddly).
Why didn’t I buy the jam? The jam is, like, the thing to buy. Why did I get the stupid cookie and crêpe mix? I am kicking myself. I guess I wanted to ‘do’ something.
Of course, like you, I was obsessed with her Netflix show: With Love, Meghan. I loved that her cooking was just putting a container of stuff into a different container. I was taken by the meticulousness over her ‘effortless’ little crafting hobbies: in episode one, she sort of laugh-yells at her MUA gay for making scented candles bad. What I find interesting is the way she so quickly punctures the idyllic vision she creates for the viewer. Immediately below the placid surface is a frosty, Pinterest nightmare. It feels oddly relatable. The message being, being perfect is really fucking hard.
I think she is doing everything now — the brand, the show, the podcast where she interviews women who would likely go to space with Katy Perry — because she and Harry are really broke. The Brits stopped paying for their security detail. I bet she still has to Venmo Tyler Perry 15k a month in rent. As she is forced to do more and more random gigs (again, very queer) it’s funny to see her try and rationalize her shit products in the aesthetic pretzel container of the mind. Like here’s her ShopMy where she’s probably making a buck for every J. Crew sweater she shills, but at least they’re laid out in color-coded order.
I wanted to write this post last week so I could be one of the first to review the collection, for clickbait reasons. But now I’m behind. The reviews have skewed anywhere from middling to full Boop! In The Cut, Emily Gould compared the texture of the jam to "slimy baby food." EJ Dickson said it was worse than Smuckers. The Daily Mail obviously had their knickers in a twist.
And maybe the jam really is that bad. But the products I tried — the crêpes and the cookies — were totally normal. In making them, I was reacquainted with why I hate baking, even from a box. I took a cooking elective in college, which was famously very hard to get into, and the lemon squares I made during the final turned out so bad the instructor asked if I had ever baked before.
Making these cookies transported me more to Santa Ana than to Santa Barbara. Last Monday, the UPS driver dropped the box off at my door and I immediately woke up startled from my daily 4:30 PM nap because I wanted to bring the cookies to a class in an hour. But I didn’t know cookies needed time to rest in the fridge before baking so I just threw them in the oven and then got so stressed when they started to fall apart. The edible flowers I was meant to finish the cookies with just sort of turned brown, like streaks of dirt.
When I got to class with my hot cookie shards, a girl who’s effortlessly good at baking had brought in lemon squares. “These are so good, wow,” everyone said as my sand-cookies remained unmolested.
“I don’t want to try them because I don’t like the royals,” my professor said, like I was asking him to sign a petition. “Why don’t you like them?” I asked. He sort of stared at me. “Just, like, everything.”
But once they cooled down, the cookies were well-reviewed. They were buttery and substantial and not very sweet: kind of the perfect, generic shortbread cookie. And the crêpes, which I made for some friends later, just tasted normal. Which is a good thing. Crêpes are really just flour, eggs and milk. And her recipe is flour, eggs and powdered milk (the cookies, however, had a lot of chemical ingredients Alicia Silverstone wouldn’t approve of).
It made me think: why sell the most basic culinary stuff? A) I think she didn’t want to get dunked on any more. B) I think she is selling the idea of making crêpes, rather than the crêpes themselves. She is reminding us: don’t just make pancakes, make crêpes! And pronounce crêpes like a girl who studied abroad.
I actually think she should turn As Ever into a multi-level marketing scheme. Get women to sell these generic products back and forth to each other forever. Then she’ll be rich.
But now it’s Passover so I lit that chametz on fire.
With Love,
Isaac