"Ophelia" > wrote in message
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>
>
> "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.
>
> Well done you! My nose is always a good indicator of something being
> ready too.

I was just going to say the same thing. I used to bake and decorate wedding
cakes and I'd check them the first second I could smell cake.