On Instagram, Ikea Russia turns emojis into recipes

Ikea asked people to post pictures of their favorite plates (they didn’t have be from Ikea) with a mixture of emojis in the caption for its #новыеидеиготовить (“new ideas for cooking” in English) campaign.

“It was a great opportunity to cook delicious dishes from the most extraordinary ingredients: Not from food, but from a variety of emoji. Right from smartphones,” said a release from Ikea Russia. The campaign was to promote its “rentable kitchens” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where customers can rent kitchen spaces and take cooking classes.

To interpret the puzzling array of emojis, Ikea worked with Russian food bloggers to comb through the 300 submissions and make 20 videos that were posted on its Instagram account.

Emojis were interpreted pretty creatively. For example, olive oil was used when someone proposed the tram emoji (because trams need oil) and the tornado emoji was interpreted as whisking. So a chicken, clouds, snowflake, tornado and squirrel combined to make brownies (with nuts), in this example below.

Кто бы мог подумать, что из этого набора можно приготовить вкуснейшее брауни с орехами? Мы принимаем вызов от @anzhelikaverevkina. Смотрите видеорецепт и ищите его описание в первом комментарии. Вы тоже хотите бросить вызов ИКЕА? Разместите фото любой пустой тарелки в своем инстаграме, отмечайте наш профиль @ikea_rus на фото, добавьте в описание хэштег #новыеидеиготовить и 5 любых эмоджи, которые станут ингредиентами!

A video posted by ИКЕА Россия (@ikea_rus) on Dec 23, 2015 at 4:17am PST