How this Baker Finds the Best Recipes on the Internet
A Q&A with the recipe bake-off queen, The Pancake Princess Erika Kwee
Hey all! Today I have for you an interview with my creator colleague and friend Erika Kwee, who also has a fantastic Substack. We’ll be back next week with a new recipe!
Known for her data-driven bake-offs that crown the best baking recipes, Erika Kwee is the recipe developer and creator behind The Pancake Princess. In 2012, her senior year at Rice University, Erika started the blog as a place to post her “carb-y” recipes. Inspiration struck five years later when she and a friend, stranded at home for a week after Hurricane Harvey, decided to make 12 chocolate chip cookie recipes in one day — to find the best one. Thus began her wildly popular series of recipe bake-offs, where she gathers a selection of recipes, bakes them all, and a group of testers (initially just family and friends — now any of her followers can sign up to be a tester!) ranks them on flavor and texture. These also include ingredient ratio breakdowns and other infographics that would make any baking enthusiast nerd-out.
This is what put Erika on my radar back in 2019. I was searching for great pumpkin bread recipes and I stumbled on her page, which led me to a great recipe. It wouldn’t be until 2021, when she left Houston for a job in New York City, that we would become fast friends during the cutest bakery tour of Williamsburg Brooklyn. In November, she was laid off from her full-time tech job, and now she’s made the leap and turned her blogging and content creation side hustle into her main gig.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Eric King: So, you are a full-time content creator now.
Erika Kwee: I am!
Do you feel like you just got pushed into that? How has the transition been from corporate to this?
I had been toying with the idea before I got laid off. And then getting laid off was definitely the push of like, There you go, that's your opportunity. The transition has been wild-fun-scary because I was not making that much money when I was doing it on the side because it never had to be the money-maker. And I was worried that it would take away the joy of baking. If you do your passion as a job, what happens? Do you get burned out? Do you hate it? But I've really enjoyed it. I feel very lucky to be doing this and I hope that I can keep it up forever.
When did you know you wanted to start this blog? And why did you call it The Pancake Princess?
I originally started the blog with a friend in my last year of college. We were going to call it the Pancake Princess and the Protein Prince. Clearly we loved alliteration. And then he wrote one post and then dropped off. I mean, we would make pancakes in the college serverie every once in a while. I think it was mostly the alliteration, and then the pancakes had a loose tie-in. [Laughs]
I was just so inspired by Smitten Kitchen, Joy the Baker — I was reading all of those classic food blogs, and just thinking, "Wow, I want to do this."
How do you decide what you're going to test? And then how do you go about picking the recipes?
I have a huge running list of ideas. It's really a matter of narrowing it down to what I'm excited to bake at the moment and what fits seasonally. When it comes to picking recipes, usually I start by looking through Google, like "best pineapple upside down cake". I'll scrape the first 20 to 30 recipes and start using those as the basis. But then I also put out a call on Instagram and then collect all of those recipes as well. If there's a recipe that's really popping up a lot on Instagram, then I'll give that more consideration.
I organize all the recipes so you can see which ones look similar. Usually, there's a benchmark recipe that everyone else has kind of adapted their recipe from or maybe even just replicated the recipe on their blog. Then I try to look for different ingredients and techniques. "Are we using sour cream versus buttermilk versus regular milk? Reverse creaming versus traditional creaming? Oil or butter?" Any factors that produce a really fabulous recipe that might surprise people.
Which was the most challenging bake-off? And separately, or maybe not separately, what was the biggest bake-off fail?
I still feel vaguely scarred by the cinnamon roll bake-off because the proofing times were quite challenging. Just scheduling, that was crazy.
In the zucchini bread bake-off, I made Alexandra's Kitchen's recipe twice. And both times, something went wrong. The first time it was literally just a hot pile of mush. The second time, it still didn't rise properly. I just remember being like, "I can't believe I made this twice and it's still terrible." I'm positive it's my fault. Usually if I mess up something really bad, and have time to remake it, I will. Usually I get it right the second time.
Has there ever been a time where you mess it up and you can't fix it? And what happens then?
Oh, yeah. I always try to specify that there could be baker's error, because I'm not a professional baker. I am very good at following recipes, but if I think I messed it up, I'll try to take it out of the running and just say, "This one is disqualified because of personal baker error." But when I remake it, then I can give my own commentary on how it tasted.
Do you ever worry beforehand that people might be offended by their place in the rankings that you publish?
I do think about that a lot. The way that I hope people consume the bake-offs is there's always going to be a crowd favorite. I say this in almost every blog post: Every other recipe, I think, would be amazing. If you baked the last place cake and took it to a party, I'm pretty sure everyone would say, "This homemade cake is amazing!" I hope that people, rather than being offended, are just like, Oh, in this particular bake-off with this particular set of testers, maybe mine wasn't the super crowd-favorite, but people still liked it for xyz-reason or they had xyz-feedback about it.
After recipe blogging for more than 10 years, what are your top pieces of advice to home bakers for success in the kitchen?
It sounds dumb, but read the entire recipe thoroughly before you start. Using a scale — using grams really makes such a difference over volume measurements. The last one is using your intuition, which is hard in the beginning. If the recipe says, "Bake for 20 to 25 minutes" and the cake is still very pale and doesn't look done, leave it in! There are a lot of answers online and you can troubleshoot before you're like, I thought it looked weird, but I just kept going.
You've earned a big following on social media. What do you think it takes to stand out and grow an audience?
The number one thing to grow on social media, which everyone else says, is consistency. To stand out — and I don't think that I do this particularly well — but it's having a specific or unique point of view. And personality really helps. Even with food influencers, you find yourself gravitating towards those who have a personality that you buy into and want to see more of. I'm still trying to find my desired online persona.
So you worked in tech, and now you're a full-time creator. What is the end game for Pancake Princess?
I don't even know. If I could make my career just doing bake-offs for the rest of my life, that would be really fun. In the meantime, it's just figuring out, How do I continue to build community through the bake-offs? Because it's not just the act of gathering the data for these baked goods that I like. When I do a bake off, I get to meet other people who are really excited about like, I don't know, no-bake cheesecake or whatever. So I really am trying to explore, How can I scale the bake-off? What other avenues are there as a food influencer that you can turn this into a full time career?
What would those avenues be?
Maybe in the future there's a revamp of the YouTube channel. I would definitely love to do a cookbook at some point. Maybe it's bake-offs going international and learning about baked goods in other countries and trying them there.
You've gone back to your roots as The Pancake Princess with these pancake reviews that you do on Instagram and TikTok. What do you look for in a good pancake? And what's the best one that you've tried in New York or elsewhere?
I want a good sear so that there's some crunch on the outside. I don't want a flabby pancake. And ideally, it's thick and cakey. It kind of melts in your mouth. And Chez Ma Tante's is the platonic ideal of these pancakes. They're fried in butter, so they're super crispy on the outside, but they're soft and cakey on the inside. I think those are the most perfect pancakes I've ever had.
She’s amazing. Love her posts. Nice interview