"zxcvbob" > wrote in message
...
> 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

I'd send the 'tweaked' (aka 'screwed up') version to FoodBanter.
-ginny