Pillsbury Bake-Off – Recipes are Due!

The deadline for recipes for the next Pillsbury Bake-Off is just seven days away!  If you like to fiddle around with ingredients to make your own recipes, I highly recommend that you check out the rules for the contest and submit a recipe.  You never know.  I was in the Bake-Off in 1996 and it was an amazing experience.  I didn’t win the big prize or any of the category prizes, but I had a blast and would love to do it again.  (Next time, you’re coming along, Mom!) 

I was one of 100 finalists with my recipe for Chocolate Toffee Caramel Bars.  The recipe was inspired by a similar baked good at a Nordstrom Cafe.  Pillsbury doesn’t have the recipe on their site, I believe because they no longer sell the qualifying ingredient – Butter Recipe cake mix.  I haven’t made the bars in years, but my sister-in-law tells me the kids at her children’s school love them.

Note – you will see this recipe on many sites, usually with no credit to Pillsbury or to me.  That’s okay, but I must say I’m disappointed to see it (with a teeny tiny modification) in this book Cake Mix Cookies: More Than 175 Delectable Cookie Recipes That Begin With a Box of Cake Mix
(just use the "search inside this book" feature, type in "Chocolate Toffee Caramel Bars" and you will see the recipe).  I guess recipe copywright is a difficult area to enforce.  It seems you can modify one ingredient and add a word or two to the title and it’s perfectly fine to publish it in your own cookbook.  But technically my Bake-Off recipe became the property of Pillsbury when I entered the contest, so it is their issue, not mine. Gives me an idea for coming up with recipes for my own cookbook, though!  Ha ha.  (Now I’m wondering how many of my recipes on my site are similar to others . . .)

I do think it is difficult to be completely original with recipes these days, though, especially with the internet, making creating Bake-Off recipes even more challenging.  So go for it!  🙂