Dear Reader,
Today's guest author, Shauna Robinson, is originally from San Diego, but she now lives in Virginia with her husband and their sleepy greyhound. Shauna is an introvert at heart--spending most of her time reading, baking, and figuring out the politest way to avoid social interaction. Her debut novel, Must Love Books, was inspired by her time working as an editorial assistant at a publishing company.
If you'd like a chance to win a copy of Must Love Books, email [email protected] to enter the giveaway.
Please welcome author Shauna Robinson...
How much can you trust your favorite recipe?
For years, I had a go-to chocolate cake recipe, but it wasn't until recently that I stopped to consider why it was my favorite. It wasn't as though I'd tried every recipe in the world--I'd just baked a cake one day and decided I liked it enough to continue using that recipe. But how would it fare if I baked several chocolate cakes, all from different recipes, and then held a taste test to determine, once and for all, which was the best?
And so my great chocolate cake experiment was born.
After some research, I selected four different chocolate cake recipes and set about baking all of them in one day. (I did scale these recipes down so that each one produced a few cupcakes rather than an entire cake. I love cake, but the human stomach has its limits.) I then tasted each one to decide my favorite.
The most surprising result? My go-to cake recipe came in last. Its flavor and texture were lacking compared to the other three cupcakes. While my go-to recipe uses all-purpose flour and butter, the winning recipe uses cake flour and oil. It produced a cupcake that was soft, moist, and flavorful. Since making that discovery, I've ditched my go-to recipe and have been using the new one ever since.
The problem is, now I don't trust all the other recipes I once thought I loved. Cookies, brownies, biscuits, breads--how many of these recipes are favorites simply because I don't know any better? How much of my love for these recipes is born out of ignorance?
But there's a wonderful lesson in this discovery: as much as I loved the recipe I knew well, there was something even better right around the corner. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we doom ourselves to discontent and spend forever chasing perfection. But it's a good (and humbling) reminder that we don't always know what we're talking about. I would have sworn that my go-to chocolate cake recipe was the best--until experience told me it wasn't.
It's also comforting to think that if we're ever not quite content with something--a recipe, a book, a job, a city--there may be other alternatives waiting to be discovered. All we need to do is give them a chance.
--Shauna Robinson
If you'd like a chance to win a copy of Must Love Books, email [email protected] to enter the giveaway.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
This month's Penguin Classics book is HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, by Julia Alvarez, with a foreword by Elizabeth Acevedo. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win.
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