The Dessert Blog

Ever wanted to enter a cooking contest? Here’s why you should!

There are only two types of cooks. There are those who love to cook and those who don’t. If you love to mess around in the kitchen, varying your recipes with a little of this and a little of that, you know that sometimes the results are mixed. You may come up with a fabulous dish that lives on in the family annals for the next generation. You may also come up with something that has your family slipping their portion to the family pet.

Cooking Contest
In any case, cooks have fun experimenting. You’ve doubtless seen cooking contests, advertised in magazines, on the net or right in your hometown at the grocery store. The question is, have you ever entered a cooking contest? Few people actually follow through on the urge. Maybe you think you’re a decent cook, but these entrants who win such competitions must have studied with Julia Childs or Madeleine Kammerer. This is absolutely a myth. Many winning contestants are ordinary men and women who simply like to cook.

You’ve probably noticed that the cooking contests advertised in magazines have ridiculously large cash prizes. A $25,000 prize is not unusual. People have won the top prize for a bowl of chili or a holiday cookie bar. If you examine your repertoire of dishes your family requests often and which enjoy rave reviews at every potluck, isn’t it possible that you could win one of these competitions? Sure you can!

If you already spend lots of time experimenting in the kitchen, you do so because you enjoy cooking. So why shouldn’t you take a shot at winning some cash or a dream vacation or car with your avocation? Wouldn’t it be cool if you even placed?

You can find a plethora of the current cooking contests on the net. If you’re a bread artisan or dessert expert, search out baking competitions. If your thing is fish cookery, look for those. There’s a cooking contest for every type of food.

After all, taste is everything when it comes to cooking. Good cooks temper texture, consistency and flavoring in a manner that makes the food a delight in the mouth on on the taste buds. All of your fans can’t be wrong. If they absolutely love your Beef Bourguignon, perhaps the judges at the cooking contest will agree. More about Cooking and Mens101.

Do you having baking traditions in your family? Is there one thing that you always bake together during a holiday? Is there one recipe that has been handed down from generation to generation? Have you shared those traditions and recipes with anyone?

This is a subject that really hits home for me because I lost some of our family recipes recently. It made me think about what happens to a recipe if no one knows about it or cares about where it goes. Nothing happens to it. It is lost to the world and may never be found again. What a truly tragic end for a great recipe (especially a baking recipe!). A wonderful cookie, pie, or cake is never made again. I really love sweets so this truly brings a tear to my eye!

A recipe is a gift. A gift of love. A gift of time and effort. A gift that can keep on giving because each time you make it, you enjoy it again. It is not only a gift from the person who created the recipe but also a gift from the person who gave it to you. Treasure those gifts and share them. A recipe and story shared is worth more than one just sitting in your recipe box. Perhaps you are waiting for just the right person or time to share it. I have been guilty of that one myself. But a recipe that isn’t shared is nothing but a piece of paper in box. It means nothing to anyone but you unless it is shared with someone else.

So how do you make sure your recipes and baking traditions are not lost?

Write them down. Of course your recipes are already written down in some form or another. But what about the funny family story or family baking tradition that goes with it? Make sure that story gets written down too.

Make sure someone in your family knows that this recipe and this family baking tradition are important to you. Make sure that they know you want it to be passed on in the family. No one will know how important it is to you unless you tell them. (So speak up!)

And last but not least, your baking assignment (should you choose to accept it) is to share one of your baking recipes (and the story that goes with it) this week with someone. Who knows, you may just start a baking tradition for that person and their family. And what better way is there to honor the gift of that recipe?

Happy Baking!

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The words, “recipe apple pie“, brought back 1,430,000 search results.

Just in Google! Yahoo! found 17,800,000 results, and msn found 10,200,000. And 6 of the first 10 results from each search engine were different. At this point, I’m already thinking that an internet search may not be the best way to find the best recipe for apple pie.

If you love apple pie as much as I do, you’ve spent some time looking for the best recipe. And how do you know it’s the best? You try it, of course.

As in: you use the recipe to bake an apple pie, then eat some and see what you think. So, if you’re searching using the phrase above, you’d need to bake 22 apple pies (which would take over 3 weeks, if you baked only one a day) just to get through the first page of search results on the top 3 search engines.

I thought there had to be a better way.

So I started over and, to maximize my chances for success, I only counted recipes from recipe sites that made it into the first 2 pages of results (I realize this is an arbitrary cut off point, but there are several million results, and only so many days when apples are in season). That meant I’d only need to test 14 different recipes.

That’s still too many.

So I narrowed it down further: the first decision was the crust – store-bought or handmade? I wanted a handmade crust, so I looked to see if it called for lard, shortening or butter. I avoid hydrogenated fats and had no lard, so I opted for butter it was. That helped eliminate some results.

Now it was down to 9 recipes (which would still require more than a week, if I only baked a pie a day), and I still wasn’t sure which kind of apples to use, which kind of extracts, which spices, how much sugar, etc… Who ever would have thought there were so many decisions to make when picking a recipe for apple pie? (But then who ever would have thought that a search for “recipe apple pie” would return so many results?)

At that point, I started thinking, “I’d gladly pay somebody to do this for me.”

I baked for a week (and I think I used nearlya bushel of apples), and I still wasn’t convinced\sure that I had the sells a downloadable cookbook called “Cooking with Apples“. The author said she’d been looking for the perfect apple pie recipe for years, and had collected a bunch of them (along with some 90 other apple recipes) and put them together into this cookbook. I decided to give it a try.

Boy, was I glad I did; there are 7 different apple pie recipes in the book, and every one I’ve tried is really good! (I’m not a big fan of sugarless recipes, so I haven’t tried that one yet, and probably won’t.) Just in case you’re curious: my favorite used Honey Crisp and Granny Smith apples, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice, lemon juice and lemon zest, almond and vanilla extract at about a 3 to 1 ratio, and had no flour or tapioca added to the filling at all.

For more delicious recipes, visit our pie recipes collection.