Step Four: Sour Cream Pound Cake Verdict

The verdict has arrived! By a very small margin, Cake A, the pound cake with homemade sour cream alternative is the winner! To conduct the sample, I surveyed twenty people offering them a piece of “Cake A” and “Cake B” and asking them to rate each cake on a scale of 1 to 5 for flavor. I also asked which cake they preferred and asked for any comments they might have about the cakes.

I was initially concerned that my classmates might not be honest with their opinions because they know me and might not want to hurt my feelings, so I made it a point to tell them that I was not emotionally invested in their preferences. Well, I needn’t have worried. Comments ranged from “Yum” to adding a third choice of “Neither” when asked which cake they prefer.

Being the math nerd that I am, I decided to perform a significance test on the results of my survey to see if the preference was statistically significant. Honestly, the requisites for performing such a test were not fulfilled because my sampling was not random. I preformed what is known as a “convenience sample” in the statistics world because I asked only people who I have classes with.

Here are the results of my sample:
Cake A (homemade sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.4 Standard Deviation=1.02
Proportion who prefer A: 11/20
Cake B (Tofutti sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.05 Standard Deviation= 1.07
Proportion who prefer B: 10/20 (Including the person who also circled “neither”)

The results were not statistically significant, for those who were wondering. I ended up with a p-value of .309. When looking for significance, smaller is better and at the very biggest, .1 is considered significant. Another problem I encountered was in my own survey making. When I made my rating scale, I meant to put “Worst Pound Cake I’ve Ever Tasted” for 1, but I said best on 1 and 5. I had to tell everyone to correct it on their individual paper. How embarrassing!

Here is the winning Recipe:

Ingredients (at room temperature)
½ cup Earth Balance Vegan Buttery Sticks
6 tbs ground flax seed + 9 tbs water
1 ½ cups flour
¼ tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 cup vegan sugar
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup sour cream alternative from http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9 by 5 by 3 inch loaf pan. Combine flour, baking powder, and baking soda.
2. In another bowl, beat earth balance buttery sticks and sugar for about ten minutes. Beat in vanilla. Slowly add flax mixture, scraping the sides of the bowl.
3. Add the dry ingredients and sour cream alternative, switching back and forth. Beat just until everything is combined.
4. Bake for 75 to 90 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

The picture shows what the sour cream alternative looked like when I made it.

Step Three: Improvisation

Today was my first experience trying a recipe of my own creation. I attempted to make a sour cream pound cake vegan. Suffice to say it was a disaster! I usually mix things by hand, so I never considered that I might need special equipment for mixing. My mom has an electric hand mixer, but it is small and inexpensive, so when she looked at how much mixing was called for in my recipe, she told me not to use it. She thought the motor might break, but she told me that I could improvise with the food processor. I hadn’t ever heard of using a food processor in that way but tried it anyway. It did not go well.

In all fairness, I’m not sure whether the food processor or the absence of real eggs caused the problems. Part of the recipe said to mix until fluffy…well, I mixed and mixed, but it never really even changed texture. It makes sense that eggs would be needed, but I thought that ground flax seeds would work. Everything I read made it sound like that was the ideal egg replacer for that situation, but I guess not. I made two versions of the cake, one with a commercial sour cream alternative (I used a product called “Sour Supreme” made by Tofutti) and a homemade sour cream alternative that I found a recipe for on this website (http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html). Tasting the two cakes right out of the oven, neither tastes quite like the sour cream pound cake I know and love, but both taste good to me. I think I like the version with homemade “sour cream” better. Tomorrow I am taking both cakes to school to see which version my classmates like better.

All in all, it took me about four hours to make two cakes, including time spent cleaning up. I am sure it should not have taken so long. I can’t imagine what a bakery would do if it took them four hours to make two cakes. That’s just ridicules. I still need to make a short survey for tasters to fill out tomorrow at school, then I am looking forward to going to sleep. What an exhausting experience!