Cooking For Engineers

I pop in on quite a few recipe websites in a typical month, usually by way of google. For instance, a week or so ago, I visited over a dozen sites while searching for a mexican-themed recipe for a Cinco de Mayo potluck at work*. And this evening, I spent some time sorting through another batch of sites with my daughter, looking for just the right coffee cake recipe for Mother's Day. In the process, I stumbled across my optimal cooking site: Cooking For Engineers.

It's obviously inspired by Cooks Illustrated, with healthy doses of Good Eats thrown in. Nice combo for kitchen-loving engineers and scientists. Reading a recipe here is like chatting with a scientist colleage about the whys and wherefores of the process. They're conversational, with just a bit of science thrown in. And I love the graphic layout at the end of each recipe. Very cool. It's amazing how simple a recipe looks in a format like this. For example, see the English Toffee recipe at left. It's the kind of layout that night encourage a timid recipe reader to give a somewhat more complicated recipe. I wonder if the site owner invented it, or if it's been around for a while? Either way I like it, and I like this site, too.

*Finally settled on Margarita Cake , though I never did find orange cake mix. So, mine was a lemon cake mix doctored up with pudding, tequilla, triple sec and lime juice and baked in a bundt pan, then basically soaked in a thin glaze made of powdered sugar with more tequilla, triple sec and lime juice. Very simple, and it got rave reviews!