Last Thursday was my dad's birthday, and I drove down for the week to
visit (and clear fences, and clean gutters, and cut limbs, and...)
Anyway, my brother decided to make a Hummingbird Cake (famous cake
recipe from _Southern Living_ magazine) and he found the recipe online
and bought the ingredients. But then he wasn't feeling well and he
asked me to bake it. He gave me the recipe that he printed-out from
Saveur.com (I just found the link:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipe...ake-1000070102 )

He said that he found the *identical* recipe at several other recipe
sites, so he was pretty sure it was the original. He also said each
site claimed the recipe as their very own.

The instructions looked a little strange and hard to follow, but I did
my best with it, especially cooking in a strange kitchen where I
didn't know where everything was. I put the pans in the oven and set
the timer for 30 minutes to check on them and turn them. The recipe
said 50 minutes, which is an awfully long time to bake, but I thought
it might be right with all that fruit in the batter.

At about 28 minutes the house started smelling like cake, so I checked
on it and the cake was not just done but maybe a little overdone. I
took them out and put on a rack. When cooled enough to handle, I
turned them out and they had fallen and felt kind of rubbery. So I
made a chocolate sheet cake as a backup in case the HB cake was a
disaster.

The HB cake actually turned out good, and I would make it again -- but
I went to bookshelf and pulled out a Southern Living Annual Recipes
from the 1980's and looked for Hummingbird Cake. It was in there.
Slightly different ingredients (like 1/2 tsp less vanilla and all
white sugar instead of a mixture of white and brown), simpler
directions that actually make sense, and it said to bake about 25 minutes.

Apparently someone took the Southern Living recipe and tweaked the
ingredients slightly, then rewrote the directions to make the recipe
"theirs" and screwed up the cooking time. Then the flawed recipe was
stolen by other web sites.

I may send a link to this post to the editors of Saveur and see if I
get a response.

Bob