I lived on TikTok's viral '20-minute recipes' for a day to see if they actually saved time and effort. I spent nearly 40 minutes on breakfast alone.

Measuring out all my ingredients and blending them into a mixture took around five minutes, and I decided to wait around seven minutes for the mixture to thicken.

I thought I was making good on the 20-minute limit at this point until I started actually trying to make the pancakes, which is when reality set in.

Disclaimer: I'm a British person living in the UK, and the pancakes we tend to make at home here are of the thinner variety, much like a French crêpe. Thus, I do not know much about making big thick pancakes like these.

When I put the gloopy pancake mixture into the pan, I started out on high heat, thinking that might help them to cook faster. However, the mixture didn't cook all the way through and I ended up burning the first on one one side.

After turning the heat down, the process slowed down significantly, and it was taking around four to five minutes for each pancake to cook. I quickly realized at this point that I was going to be spending quite a long time standing at the stove, especially since the quantities in the recipe meant there was enough mixture to make around five pancakes.

On the bright side, the smell of cinnamon in the mixture was simply incredible, so that helped me work up an appetite along the way.

I served up my pancakes with a chocolate spread that I had at home because it was the quickest and easiest option. I noticed the creator who posted this recipe served theirs with a side of eggs, but that did not appeal to me and would have likely added more time and an additional pan that I needed to wash later.

Overall, the recipe took me 39 minutes to make. It would be fair to say that the time it took to make the pancakes in the pan was around 20 minutes since each one needed four to five minutes to cook properly, but this did not include the time taken to make the mixture, let it set, and put toppings on.

I probably should have realized this in advance, since the pancakes were thick and would require a lot of cooking time, but I think I was subconsciously misled by the quick transitions in the video, which made the process of cooking look so easy and fast.

Because I was trying to rush the process of cooking, some of my pancakes came out misshapen or burnt and did not look anywhere near as presentable as they did in the original TikTok. They tasted fine enough, but I don't think it was mind-blowingly yummy or convenient enough for me to make again.

I'll probably be sticking to classic British pancakes, which don't require as much cooking time, in the future.

The creator who posted this recipe started off by adding chicken stock paste to boiling water, and then mixing a number of ingredients together to make her broth base, including peanut butter, rice vinegar, and soy sauce.

The trouble is, she did not include any quantities that gave me guidance on how much to use, and I've noticed that a lot of short TikTok recipe videos don't do this either, perhaps because there isn't enough time in a short-form format to explain this in detail.

I ended up trying to vaguely estimate how much of each ingredient I thought I should put into the base, but after tasting the mixture I felt that it probably had too much peanut butter, and began to wish I'd chosen a recipe that didn't involve so much guesswork.

There was also no specific guidance about how much pork to use for the ramen, so I used a quarter of the packet I bought as a rough estimate. There ended up being way too much pork in the end and it took a lot longer to cook than the recipe probably intended for.

Throughout the process, I basically had no idea if I was doing any of it right but was surprised when I put the components together and it actually looked half-decent.

The ramen took me 29 minutes to make in total, which is pretty impressive compared to the 39-minute breakfast I made. I figure I would probably have been finished at least three or four minutes earlier had I used less pork as well.

I was quite pleased with the way my finished product looked, given the little time I had put into it. The creator garnished hers with a ramen egg, but I didn't have any to hand, and making them from scratch requires soaking them in marinade for hours, so I just went without one to keep the recipe as minimum effort as possible.

When I sat down to eat it, I was shocked by the richness of the flavor produced by this quick recipe. The broth had a really nice level of spiciness to it, and the pork tasted well-seasoned, making it worth the wait.

I would definitely make this ramen again, and hopefully with a better sense of the ingredient quantities needed, it would be even quicker the second time around.

To put it plainly, I hate cooking with raw meat.

I tend to prefer cooking vegetarian food at home, but with the aim of being adventurous, I set about cutting my chicken and coating it with seasoning and cornflour as the recipe instructed. By the time that was done, seven minutes had gone by.

I then prepared the honey garlic sauce, and when that was done, I started frying the chicken. Doing things one step at a time was definitely slowing me down, but I wasn't familiar enough with the recipe to multitask.

After frying the chicken for four minutes on each side, as the recipe instructed, it was clear that it wasn't cooked all the way. I had potentially cut my strips a bit too thick and realized they would take absolutely ages to cook if I didn't cut them into smaller chunks.

It took around 16 minutes for me to fry the chicken properly, and then I had to remove it from the pan to heat up the sauce, before adding the chicken back into the pan.

All in all, the recipe took 36 minutes to cook and plate up with some sesame seeds on top.

The recipe only produced a plate of chicken at the end and did not incorporate any potential sides I might want to have with it, which was annoying.

Thankfully, I own a rice cooker and was able to have that on in the background during the process. I included the time taken to wash the rice and put it in the rice cooker in the overall time total for making this dinner recipe, but that probably only added three to four minutes to it.

The recipe didn't include a vegetable side either, however, so I do think it would realistically take a bit longer for me to build a whole meal around the chicken. I'm not sure I'd really consider it a "20-minute dinner" for me.

I suppose that the trap of any cooking content on social media or celebrity chef TV show is that it all looks so easy on screen, but it's hard to match up to in real life.

Some of the quick transitions in the TikTok videos made it look like all the steps would be really fast to complete, but I think this was ultimately just an illusion created by the video editing process.

For example, with the honey garlic chicken recipe, the creator did not show herself peeling and cutting up her garlic, so while it looked like the process of adding this ingredient to the recipe only took seconds, the reality of having to prepare the garlic in real life added several minutes to my overall cook time which I didn't necessarily anticipate beforehand. I suppose one way that I could cut the time down on this recipe in the future is by using pre-crushed garlic.

None of the recipes took into account the time it takes to do the dishes afterward either. I didn't include this in the overall cook times, but for some of the recipes — particularly for the ramen where there were multiple components that needed to be prepared separately — I had a whole sink-full of dishes which took a long time to deal with after eating. On the other hand, on a normal day when I'm making a simple wrap for lunch, I usually just have one plate to wash up at the end before I can get moving with the rest of my plans for the afternoon.

I originally hoped that I could add some of these recipes to my repertoire for when I was really short on time and needed something new to cook during the week, but I now think that if I was in a big rush to go somewhere and only had 20 minutes to make something, it would be far more realistic for me to opt for boiling some pasta and adding sauce than trying one of these more ambitious TikTok recipes.

That being said, if you're not taking the time limit as ridiculously seriously as I have been, you'll likely find that some of these fast-paced TikTok recipes contain time-saving hacks that can cut down longer recipes. Instead of spending hours making ramen broth, the hack mentioned earlier — using chicken stock instead — could be really helpful.

I also think it's possible that if I were to practice these recipes a few times, I could trim down the time taken for me to make them, but ultimately, I'm not sure I'd ever be able to do them in a strict 20-minute slot unless I was constantly rushing and stressing myself out.

Overall, I'm glad that I finally gave making recipes from TikTok a go, but I'd definitely want to set my expectations for the process a little lower before trying it again.

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