Research & Development

The people at my office are often my guinea pigs for trying out recipes. Not that they are complaining. I generally try out lots of recipes before settling on one that I am going to use full time. This time, I had an order for an Italian cream cake for a baby shower. I wanted to make sure that I had the best recipe possible, because the person I was making it for holds a special place in our hearts as one of my son's former teachers, and an excellent one at that. So, what I did was try two different recipes, each prepared with different ingredients. Then I tried two different icings. For each cake recipe, I split the batter and made one cake layer with unsweetened coconut, and the other with sweetened coconut. The two recipes were completely different as well. One was this real elaborate recipe, much like a German chocolate cake, and the other was a quick throw together recipe. For the icings, both we re cream cheese based, but one was loaded with nuts and the other was smoother. I took all of these to work and put out a sign explaining that people had to work for their treat. They were asked to vote on their favorite cake recipe and favorite icing recipe. The winner would be my new go-to recipe.

I looked over several recipes before picking the two I did. After you've been cooking for a long time, you get pretty good at looking at a recipe and gauging whether or not you'll like it. These two recipes stood out. I  got lots of very good feedback from people. Since my office is loaded with engineers, some people put a whole lot of thought into their feedback. I was very surprised with the result. My personal favorite was the more complex cake recipe. Mostly because the texture was light and the flavor was more delicate. The overwhelming winner of the vote was the easier recipe. Who am I to argue with popular opinion.