Erika, The Pancake Princess
Her data-driven bake offs that can help you find the best recipes, how she bakes up to 16 cakes in one day, and the best pancake in NYC
When it comes to recipes, there is a tyranny of choice. Take chocolate chip cookies, an ongoing obsession in my household. A Google search for “best chocolate chip cookies” yields over 100,000 results. The Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe on the bag is predictably good. But maybe there’s a better one. Or you want to make them with brown butter or oatmeal, or replicate the legendary Levain cookie at home.
Perhaps you want the best brownie recipe, and the best to you is chewy and not cakey. Or, you want the best lemon bar that is not too sour but just a tad sour. Or you are tasked with making vegan brownies for your brother’s new girlfriend and can’t imagine that brownies without eggs could be tasty.
That’s where Erika, The Pancake Princess, has done the work for you. She conducts head-to-head bake offs to compare the “best” online recipes. Her detailed findings will help you identify recipes that are worth your time and pricey eggs, based on your preferences. She doesn’t always agree with the top-rated picks and will tell you why, further helping you choose the recipe that’s likely to give you the desired results.
She’s made deep dives into pancakes, quick breads, cookies, cakes, pies, apple cider donuts, waffles, mac and cheese, and so much more. She also shares lots of recipes that are vegan, gluten-free, and other types of baking. Her “Pancake Fridays” posts on her site feature more than 30 stories of different pancake recipes. Here’s how she does it.
A bake off might include as many as 16 recipes. How do you choose the recipes?
I start by searching “best chocolate chip cookie recipe,” [or “best” followed by the name of the food] and I'll collect about the first three pages of Google results. I also put out a call on Instagram for suggestions.
I also try to look for patterns, like if there's big groupings of recipes we're all using that include brown butter or another specific ingredient. I always try to choose a few interesting techniques. For example, if I'm doing a cake bake off, and one recipe uses reverse creaming [beating softened butter directly into the dry ingredients, rather than creaming it with only sugar], and another uses regular creaming, I will try both. I look at all of the different factors that go into what makes the recipe unique and try to get a representative sample of all of them.
Then I put all recipes that I get into a spreadsheet. I compare them and group duplicate recipes and those that are very similar. Then I pick one recipe from that group that represents that ratio of ingredients.
What aspects of your approach are data driven?
The main aspect is the taster rankings. When I do a bake off, I'm baking a full 24 cookies or a single layer of a cake. I'll cut those into samples and usually I have around 30 to 50 [wow!] tasters rating each of the samples and putting their ratings into a Google form. I use that data to rank what is the best. It’s not my opinion, it’s how 30 or 50 tasters ranked the samples.
Sometimes I'll analyze the ingredient composition of each recipe, which I did with the butter mochi bake off and use that data to try to parse out trends.
What are they rating?
It depends on the item, but usually it’s flavor, texture, and overall. Sometimes there will be an aspect unique to that item, such as the sourness of a lemon bar. If it’s a bake off for a cake with frosting, I might have them rate the cake and frosting separately and then both together.
Tell me about your baking and tasting day.
My day starts around 7 am. During the week prior, I will do the grocery shopping and make the spreadsheet of all the recipes I'm going to try. I’ll usually prep the dry ingredient mixtures the day before so that the day of, it's really easy to make one cake or cookie recipe after another. I also create a schedule for baking, so if the oven temperature is as low as 325 degrees, I start with that recipe and end with the one that bakes at 375 degrees.
Typically, I will be baking continuously until 2 or 3 pm. Pre COVID when I was living in Houston, I would invite my friends and whoever they wanted to bring over to my house in the afternoon. People would be sitting on the floor, spread all over my house, trying all of the baked goods and it was super fun. But during COVID, I started doing a pickup method and people would come to my door with their own container. I'd fill it up with all the samples. They would take them home to taste and then rate them online. I've adopted that method since I moved to New York because my apartment is really small and I can't host people.
You must have a decent-sized kitchen by New York standards?
There’s one oven and I can fit a standard-size cookie sheet in there, but not two. So it is pretty small. [Wow.]
Do you have a tasting panel of regulars? How does somebody become a taster?
I used to have a regular tasting group in Houston. In New York, I opened it up on Instagram to anyone who wanted to sign up. Now, every once in a while on Instagram, I'll say I’m doing another bake off, let me know if you want to get on the taster listserv. People who respond get emails with the invites.
Do you ever hear from the recipe developer or entity whose recipe you've tested?
Occasionally. Often people thank me for testing their recipe. I feel conflicted because I don't ever want to say this person's recipe was the worst. I'm sure it feels terrible to see your recipe at the bottom of the list. I always try to frame it as everyone has different preferences, and it can be very subjective and personal. As an example, in the coffee cake bake off, my personal favorite was ranked at the bottom! It’s still my favorite that I make all the time.
Has there ever been a contentious tasting where people felt very strongly one way or the other about it or you saw radical disagreement?
Yes, the lemon bar bake off. Some people love a tart lemon bar and some people prefer a sweet lemon bar that's really thick. The really tart lemon bars, which I personally like, landed at the bottom of the ratings because a slight majority preferred the sweeter bars.
How did you become the Pancake Princess?
I started the blog my senior year of college. I was going to start it with a friend. The original name was going to be “The Pancake Princess and the Protein Prince.” I loved eating vegetarian food and he was all about protein and bodybuilding. We both loved desserts, and so we were going to create this dual blog. He wrote one blog post and dropped off, and I stuck with the name. I do love pancakes, but it doesn't make as much sense now since I don't really focus on them.
Have you conducted a pancake taste test?
Yes [see it here], and I found my favorite recipe after that.
What is your favorite type of pancake and favorite pancake recipe?
I like a thick buttermilk pancake. My favorite one is from Chez Ma Tante in New York. The New York Times published the recipe. They fry their pancakes in clarified butter, so of course they're so delicious.
I've seen that recipe and I always think one day I'm going to make it, but the amount of butter—more than 1 cup for 6-8 pancakes!—in that recipe is kind of insane.
I know it's insane, but you have to try it! It's so good! [I encouraged her to visit Sadelle’s, which has some of the best pancakes I’ve had.]
You've tested a lot of chocolate chip cookies—at least 42 recipes by my count. What are the elements of a good chocolate chip cookie?
A good chocolate chip cookie has to have a crispy edge and a gooey center. I don't like too many chocolate chips in my cookie because I want to be able to taste the dough. [Spoiler alert: Her classic chocolate chip cookie bake off tested samples with two groups and the highest-ranked recipes were from Cook’s Illustrated and All Recipes.]
What’s been the most challenging item that you've baked for a test?
Cinnamon rolls because the proofing time was really tricky with multiple recipes.
What are your favorite destinations for baked treats?
There's a place called L’Appartement 4F in Brooklyn that makes croissants. My friend just opened a bakery called BiCleo in Brooklyn and her cakes are the most beautiful and so tasty. I could go on, but I'll stop there.
Your videos on You Tube and Instagram are very popular. Your Levain cookie video had more than 2,000 likes. Can you tell me about what goes into making the videos?
The Instagram videos are about me trying to give more of a live, visual aspect to the bake offs. I can describe lemon bars, but seeing the ratio of the crust to the filling or how thick it looks, really helps people make decisions when they're trying to decide what recipe to make.
I know you've done some bake offs with savory food such as mac and cheese. Do you cook savory food?
I try to cook healthy when I'm at home because I do eat out a fair amount and I bake a ton. I cook for survival. I do love to cook for an elaborate dinner party, so it's extreme—Either I'm cooking very boring meals or I'm trying an elaborate recipe that I've seen on Pinterest or Instagram.
What’s a boring meal you cook?
I love what I call a stir fry, which someone pointed out is a steam fry because I throw broccoli, carrots, kale, and tofu in a pan and fry them for a little bit and then steam them. I will eat that with rice. If I’m feeling fancy, I'll make a miso sauce to go on top, but otherwise it might be soy sauce.
Is being the Pancake Princess your full-time occupation?
I was laid off from my full-time, corporate job in November. [She was a product manager at a tech company and has done product marketing for a software company.] This is an interesting time to see can I make this site my full-time job. I’m on the fence. I’m casually interviewing for jobs back in the corporate world and also trying to put as much energy as I can into The Pancake Princess to see can I sustain myself on it.
Could you ever see yourself opening a bakery or working in a corporate job for a food or bakery company?
I would love to open a bakery in theory, but I’m not sure if it would spark joy for me in the long-run. I could also see myself working in a corporate job in the food industry, but I also think it probably wouldn’t be as personally satisfying as doing my own thing in the food world. It’s tough to say, so many options!
Tell me about your favorite ingredients: Are there specific types of ingredients that you prefer?
Diamond Crystal kosher salt is worth going out to find [totally agree!] Salt varies greatly and table salt is so different from Diamond kosher salt. That changed the way I bake once I started using it because it added an element of consistency—and it just made everything taste better.
Also, I want to do an experiment because I think buying cake flour is important. Many articles say you can substitute corn starch plus all-purpose flour for cake flour, but I think cake flour has a specific taste. Bravetart [Stella Parks] notes that cake flour has an unusual starch content that makes it taste particularly sweet and has a distinctive flavor of white wheat. This tends to give your cake a more storebought or cakey flavor—in a good way, in my opinion!—compared to all-purpose flour.
I am on the fence about real vanilla. I think it's important if you're using it in a custard but not important if you're using it in a baked good. When it comes to eggs, I’ll choose good quality organic ones if I’m making a custard or a lemon bar and want that vibrancy from the yolks, but in many cases, regular eggs will be fine, especially given their high cost.
What is your favorite type of chocolate chips?
Valrhona, and Guittard if I’m going to splurge; Ghirardelli is my usual grocery store favorite.
What are your go-to equipment and tools?
An offset spatula really changed my life—it makes a difference for frosting cakes. Also, a scale for accurate measuring. I use the top-rated one on Wirecutter and it was cheap and works well. A handheld juicer made a huge difference for me because I used to squeeze lemons by hand with a fork to get all the juice out, which was extremely time-consuming. I also use a cookie scoop for making consistently sized cookies that look really pretty when they bake. I also love Tovolo spatulas! My friend introduced me to them and the sharp edge makes a huge difference when scraping the bowl.
You've been running bake offs and publishing stories on your site for over ten years now. What have you learned?
One takeaway is if you add a little bit of sugar when you're proofing yeast, and water or another liquid, it works so much better and is a foolproof way to bake.
Also, I’ve observed that everyone is riffing off each other's recipes and changing very minute things so there's at least a hundred different versions of one recipe. Also, when it comes to cakes, I tend to like cakes that use reverse creaming technique. I also discovered that I love brown butter, which I didn’t know about before I started doing bake offs.
What have you learned or observed about human nature or the tasting aspect of what you do?
That I'm not a super taster. Some of my tasters write the most detailed commentary and notice the tiny bit of nutmeg that's in a cookie, which I only know because I made it. This is where the power of the data comes in, plus the value of the notes that they're giving me on each baked good.
What makes it fun is all the different comments that I'm getting from the tasters. Their observations are really interesting to read. I have a friend who loves sports and writes the most incredible commentary. Here are a few [maybe I can hire her friend to comment on Palate & Palette stories]:
“As soon as this piece hit my tasting plate, I said to myself out loud, “Men’s Warehouse.” You’re going to like the way you look, I guarantee it. And I was right. This was a cheesecake that I love and idolize. A true role model. This is a cheesecake you want to date your daughter.”
“Wow. We’re are back! The cheese cake is the Bo Jackson of desert. Bo knows what you need and gives it to you. This cheesecake would dominate in any arena. Whether it is a wedding cake or on a summer picnic. This is a winner winner cheesecake dinner.”
“Sleeper cheese cake. Like a late round steal that becomes your franchise quarterback. It’s not exemplary but it is exactly what the franchise needs to get out of the cellar and back on the winning ways!”
“Flashy cheesecake. Like the best kid on the JV team. Thinks he’s better than he is. Life is going to be tough for this cocky cheesecake.”
Do you think there's some kind of cognitive dissonance when people are waiting in line for a very long time to try a popular baked treat and they think it tastes good because they’ve invested so much time waiting?
I'm going to say no because I waited in line for almost 45 minutes recently for a spiral croissant from Lafayette Bakery in New York. It’s this beautiful spiral and I thought it would be amazing. It was so disappointing because the croissant itself didn’t have that interior croissant texture and the cream flavor was disappointing.
I was thrilled to see your vegan brownie bake off, because vegan baking can be challenging. What did you learn from that particular bake off?
I discovered so many vegan bakers and cooks that I didn't know existed. Also, I was reminded of how amazing aquafaba is: It’s the liquid from chickpeas that you can whip into a very good meringue and use as an amazing substitute for eggs in brownies and other baked goods.
I was also reminded of the power of flax eggs [1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed mixed with 2.5 tablespoons of water can be a substitute for an egg in some recipes]. One of the recipes I used advised against using flax and said the pieces would get stuck in your teeth, but I didn't find that to be the case. With the current egg shortage, I hope everyone will experiment with egg-free baking if the cost of eggs is a prohibiting factor. Flax eggs and aquafaba are so cheap and great alternatives.
What might you tackle next?
I would love to tackle mooncakes and babka, which would be more difficult than cinnamon rolls, but I would excited about that. I’m considering coconut cake, pumpkin cheesecake, and maybe pumpkin cinnamon rolls because they're so good. [I put in my request for vegan pumpkin pie, and Mom and Dad, you can thank me next Thanksgiving if it happens.]
Lightning round questions
If tomorrow was your birthday and I was going to bake you a cake, what kind of cake would you want it to be? A yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
Favorite baking show. I don’t really have one! The timed baking/cooking shows stress me out.
Do you have an opinion about the Great British Bakeoff? I used to love it, but honestly stopped because it would give me the most intense sweet cravings everytime I watched it!
Most memorable meal. For my birthday, we went to Bludorn in Houston. It was the most amazing service, and I had never experienced hospitality in that way before. Alejandra Salas was the pastry chef at the time and I remember being wowed by the incredible dessert spread (with a baked Alaska!).
You're hosting a dinner party and you get to invite six people living or dead. Who is coming and what are you going to serve them? I would invite some of my favorite food bloggers because I think that would be fun, so it would be Deb of Smitten Kitchen, Joy the Baker, The Korean Vegan, Ambitious Kitchen, Hetty McKinnon, and Joanne Chang. I would be so starstruck [I want a seat at this table]!
I would make a cake buffet, like I did for my birthday last year, or the year before. I made six cakes from Milk Bar. My favorite was a blueberry corn cake. I also made their birthday cake, their passion fruit chocolate chip cake, and a chocolate on chocolate cake.
Favorite piece of art that you own. You can kind of see it in my background. My boyfriend makes collage art out of recycled cardboard.
Most captivating museum visit. The Louvre. I remember getting lost in this enormous museum for hours.
Palate & Palette menu for Erika, The Pancake Princess
Here’s what I would serve if Erika came to lunch or dinner, which she is invited to do:
Socca (a crispy chickpea pancake)
Watermelon and tomato salad
Corn fritters
Localish cheeses
Erika is amazing!! How fun and delicious would it be to participate in a tasting?! Thanks for the reminder about aquafaba, I have meant to try making it. Totally agree about vanilla, I don't think it makes a difference in certain baked goods.