By Amanda Santiago

The one way to complicate such a simple recipe is by messing with the original. Take the Piña Colada for example. This legendary soft drink is one of the most iconic, most popular out there. Wither it’s on vacation or at your local Bahama Breeze pretending to be, the Piña Colada is known by everyone. Including minors since, like most soft drinks, you can order it virgin.
 
The Piña Colada comes from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Where bartender Ramón Monchito, first created the iconic drink at the Caribe Hilton hotel in 1954. He mixed up a fruity blend of rum, coconut cream and pineapple juice and the piña colada was born! The way to create a piña colada is still just as simple. Start off with a couple of cubes of ice in your blender, pour in fresh Coco Coconut Cream or Coco Lopez, add a couple pieces of fresh pineapple, two shots of the light-colored rum, blend it all together and garnish with a cherry or piece of pineapple. To really set the mood add one of those tiny
umbrellas.
 
In its simplest, the piña colada is already perfect. The drink tastes like an early beach morning and sunset evenings, even if it’s at your local bars’ happy hour. However, social media put so many different spins on it complicating its simplicity. It’s becoming harder to keep track of all of them. To find any of the new version’s just open any form of social media, go into the search bar, type in

“How to make a Piña Colada?”
 
 Immediately your able to choose from the 100s of different types of versions social media offers. This is where it becomes overwhelming. There is now Piña Colada margaritas, smoothies, slushes, cupcakes, regular cakes, ice cream, cake pops, flavored coffee creamers, passion fruit piña colada – even a sunrise piña colada. The internet is obsessed with making their own version to shove down your throat. Unfortunately, the original recipe begins to get lost in all the new mixes. Each content creator uses a different recipe that they swear by. Either with a little more of this and a lot more of that, most of them preaching.

“This is the best” or “The easiest way,” to make a piña colada. The one thing they all have in common: liquor, sugar, and a headache.

Influencers always take the fun out of creating. By using specific tags to mark the exact ingredients they use, where they bought their product, where to get them and most importantly- how much. The truth behind all the tags and infamous “link is in my bio” nonsense, is mostly because it’s a paid sponsorship. To them, it doesn’t matter if its good or not. If you watched their video and bought something from their bio, their still making money. They push this idea, that it has to be the same exact ingredients they use in the video or

“It won’t taste good.”
 
Naturally the ingredients are usually top-shelf products. Most of them costing 15 dollars more than the average bottle of rum, using only organic pineapples and coconuts, content creators make spending the extra money seem worth it. By using fancy videos and marketing slogans such as

 “The pineapples need to blessed by the fruit gods!” or “The coconuts need to be organic!”

I decided to make the piña colada cupcakes. After spending 70 dollars on all the separate ingredients, making sure my fruit was blessed by the organic fruit gods, making the frosting from scratch, three hours of supposed to be easy baking instructions, and buying the top shelf liquor that was linked in their bio– the cupcakes were disgusting. Not only was I short 70 dollars and three hours of my life, the best part of the soggy cupcake was the rum at the bottom.
 
It may sound ridiculous to most to spend that amount of money from a link, but many people are suspectable to it. Especially if the video has over 200,000 likes, it must be good. Who wants a bad piña colada at the family BBQ anyway? Not me, that’s why I stick with beer, less complicated.