43,000 Instagram followers agree: Pancake Princess isn’t half-baked

Data-driven taste tests show how recipes stack up

In her single-oven duplex kitchen, it’s not unusual for Erika Kwee to bake 12 different cookie recipes in a day.

Kwee is the blogger behind The Pancake Princess, where she posts the analytical results of bake-offs she conducts using a blind ranking system and the palates of real Houstonians — her grateful friends and sweettooth acquaintances.

Earlier this year on her quest to find the recipe for the best lemon poppy seed muffins, for example, Kwee pitted against one another nine recipes, including those published by the New York Times, in the Bouchon Bakery cookbook and on the food blogs Hummingbird High and Yammie’s Noshery.

To avoid variables, Kwee baked all nine versions on the same day, using consistent ingredients where possible, and had 35 tasters pick up samples to simultaneously rank treats online using a 1-to-10 scale on flavor, texture and overall appeal.

As evidenced in a detailed bar graph on her blog, the Yammie’s Noshery recipe, which Kwee summarized as “a tender, closecrumbed muffin with a delightfully lemony flavor,” was victorious.

Kwee’s experiment — using data to determine whether one popular recipe can stand out as the ultimate crowd-pleaser — began in 2017 when Kwee, a Rice

University MBA and project manager at Hewlett Packard, began spending more of her evening hours baking.

“I would always look at Pinterest, and I’d have a million recipes pinned,” she says. “I was constantly Googling ‘best chocolate chip cookie’ or ‘best banana bread,’ ” and she would have trouble remembering which recipes she had already tried.

With an endless amount of beautiful imagery and recipe content available online, home cooks like her can become overwhelmed, Kwee says. So she set out to find a systematic way “to sort through some of the noise and help you make an easier, faster decision on what to make.”

Kwee, 30, has challenged commonly available recipes for banana bread, Parker House

Erika Kwee Erika Kwee put various Levain cookie recipes to the test.