Holiday Bake-Off

By Anita Hamilton

My ideal Christmas morning begins like this: I sleep late and wake to the smell of fresh cinnamon buns baking in the oven. I crawl out of bed, slip into a warm robe and stroll downstairs to sip hot chocolate by the fire. Nibbling on a roll and chatting with my family, I bask in the glow of Christmas lights reflecting off presents piled high under the tree.

To help make that picture-perfect holiday happen, I volunteered this year to bake cinnamon buns for Christmas brunch. Since the only buns I've ever made are the ones that come in a pop-open can, I decided to log on to the Web for some fresh ideas.

A search for "recipes" on Yahoo turned up dozens of cooking sites, ranging from starchefs.com which features the likes of Alice Waters and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, to yumyum.com which caters to college students on a budget. Many off-line favorites have companion sites like bettycrocker.com cooksillustrated.com and foodtv.com There's even a Weird and Different Recipes site, offering spider salad and curried kangaroo tail.

For my purposes, four sites looked especially promising: allrecipes.com cooking. com, epicurious.com and marthastewart. com. AllRecipes is the biggest, with over 20,000 recipes submitted by users. Epicurious' 11,000 selections come from past issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, while cooking.com culls many of its 5,400 recipes from Cooking Light and Fine Cooking. Martha Stewart's relatively slim 1,000 offerings come from her magazine.

All have good search features, cooking tips and ways to save favorite recipes. Cooking.com and Epicurious even have online videos to guide you through tricky techniques like making fresh pasta or roasting a goose. The most useful features are the ratings and reviews on allrecipes.com and epicurious.com which helped me choose between similar recipes.

Next, I embarked on a 24-hour cinnamon-bun-baking marathon, blending some 11 cups of flour, six cups of sugar, a pound of butter and various other ingredients into an array of sweet treats. Martha Stewart's maddeningly precise and time-consuming recipe almost drove me to the pop-open cans, while AllRecipes' obtuse instructions and cake-mix ingredients struck me as suspect. I liked Epicurious' tip for using a sandwich bag with a hole in the bottom corner to drizzle on glaze like a pro, and found cooking.com's guidelines to be the most straightforward of all.

The ultimate test, of course, is taste. Among my panel of expert eaters, Martha's Cinnamon Pecan Sticky Buns were the clear favorite for their rich flavor, soft dough and impressive crown of chopped pecans. Least liked were cooking.com's Cinnamon Rolls, which my editor pronounced "bland, dry and undistinguished." The others fell somewhere in between. While one colleague thought Epicurious' Sour Cherry Pecan Cinnamon Buns had "a nice tang," others found the dough too breadlike. I thought AllRecipes' self-proclaimed Best Ever Cinnamon Buns tasted surprisingly good considering that packaged cake mix was a main ingredient.

So it looks as if I won't be sleeping late on Christmas after all. Martha's elaborate recipe takes so much preparation, I'll have to get up early to bake--while the rest of my family gets to wake up to the smell of cinnamon in the air.

For past technology columns, visit our website at time.com/personal You can send questions to Anita at [email protected]