Hannah Hart is probably not the best person to teach you to make ice cream. In one of the episodes of her YouTube cooking show, the 27-year-old tries to whip up the creamy dessert, but she doesn’t have the right ingredients, the right equipment or the motivation. What she does have is a good time.
Hart’s cooking show is called “My Drunk Kitchen,” and throughout her attempt at making ice cream — using the wrong kind of sugar and nothing more than two small plastic zip-close bags to mix up the treat — she swigs rosé (“It tastes a little bit like white wine except pink,” she says), attempts parkour on her stove, dons a silly hat and accent and makes hilarious, slurred quips.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do right now, I’m going to steep a vanilla bean,” she says sarcastically, looking at the recipe. “You ever notice that when people make things from scratch, that suddenly means they’re better than you?”
Such amusing moments are what have propelled Hart — a sort of Lena-Dunham-meets-Julia-Child — to accidental stardom.
In early 2011, the recent college grad was working as a translator and living in New York City. As a joke for a friend who lived across the country, she made a funny video of herself swigging red wine, dancing and trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich . . . only to realize she doesn’t have any cheese in the house. It quickly went viral, and Hart, who says she’d always wanted a career in entertainment but wasn’t pursuing it for practical reasons, was suddenly an Internet celebrity.
“I was shocked,” she says, “As shocked as you would be if you put a picture up on Instagram and you were like, ‘Miss you Kelly,’ or something like that, and then everybody was like, ‘This is the best “I miss you” picture of all time, can’t wait for your next one.’ ”
That first video, “Butter Yo S - - t,” has more than 3.2 million views on YouTube, and Hart has her own channel, MyHarto, with more than 1.3 million subscribers. “My Drunk Kitchen” is in its second season, celebs such as Mary Louise Parker and writer John Green have appeared on the show and Hart’s first book “My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking & Going With Your Gut” hits shelves Tuesday.
The book falls into a unique publishing genre. It’s “self-help parody-meets-drunk cooking,” Hart says. Recipes for creations such as “Layzagna” (frozen lasagna adorned with potato chips) and a “pizza cake” (several frozen pieces layered atop each other and baked to perfection) are sprinkled among bits of advice such as, “Accept failure. Not all of your creations are going to be good.”
Hart says she’s never been injured cooking under the influence. She only uses a butter knife and avoids cooking with fire unless a sober person is also on set. And, while she often went out drinking when she started the show in her early 20s, she’s now a homebody who imbibes little outside of taping “My Drunk Kitchen.”
As for how much she actually drinks during the show, she’ll only say that “I’m exactly as drunk as I look.”