Earlier this year on her quest to find the recipe for the best lemon poppy seed muffins, for example, Kwee pitted against one another nine recipes, including those published by the New York Times, in the Bouchon Bakery cookbook and on the food blogs Hummingbird High and Yammie’s Noshery.

To avoid variables, Kwee baked all nine versions on the same day, using consistent ingredients where possible, and had 35 tasters pick up samples to simultaneously rank treats online using a 1-to-10 scale on flavor, texture and overall appeal.

As evidenced in a detailed bar graph on her blog, the Yammie’s Noshery recipe, which Kwee summarized as “a tender, close-crumbed muffin with a delightfully lemony flavor,” was victorious.

Kwee’s experiment — using data to determine whether one popular recipe can stand out as the ultimate crowd-pleaser — began in 2017 when Kwee, a Rice University MBA and project manager at Hewlett Packard, began spending more of her evening hours baking.

RECIPE: Erika Kwee’s Cakey Cinnamon Pancakes

“I would always look at Pinterest, and I’d have a million recipes pinned,” she says. “I was constantly Googling ‘best chocolate chip cookie’ or ‘best banana bread,’” and she would have trouble remembering which recipes she had already tried.

With an endless amount of beautiful imagery and recipe content available online, home cooks like her can become overwhelmed, Kwee says. So she set out to find a systematic way “to sort through some of the noise and help you make an easier, faster decision on what to make.”

Kwee, 30, has challenged commonly available recipes for banana bread, Parker House rolls, coffee cake, pecan pie, gingerbread cookies, classic yellow cake, snickerdoodles, scones and waffles — amassing 43,000 followers on Instagram along with the way.

Often, the widely followed bloggers whose recipes she uses share the bake-off results, and Kwee’s Instagram brushes with fame extend beyond foodies.

She recounts with shock the time a follower tipped her off that actress and musician Zooey Deschanel was following The Pancake Princess. “She liked one of my posts, and I just died,” Kwee said.

It was Kwee’s own audience that nominated her for Saveur’s 2019 Blog Awards, ultimately voting her Readers’ Choice in the Baking & Sweets category.

At the awards ceremony in Cincinnati, Kwee got to meet recipe-world titans including David Lebovitz and Deb Perelman, the blogger behind Smitten Kitchen.

“It was just a dream come true to have been reading their blogs for years,” Kwee said. Talking to Perelman “was unreal because I’m such a fan, and she was so nice in real life.”

The feeling is mutual.

Perelman says before she met Kwee at the event, she was familiar with The Pancake Princess bake-offs. “I loved what she was doing,” Perelman said. “I love that her only agenda is finding the best recipes.”

Smitten Kitchen once won a bake-off on The Pancake Princess for best zucchini bread, but, Perelman said, “I happily share her results whether I ‘win’ or ‘lose’ because it’s objectively useful to people who cook at home, and I often refer to her past bake-off favorites when a reader needs a recipe for something I don’t have, or wants it made in a way I haven’t.”

Over time, Kwee has become efficient through trial and error, sharing honestly with her audience if she flubs up a recipe and detailing contest methodology such as whether pans were lined, the brand of flour used and which recipes called for the batter to rest overnight.

Having once given her samplers “taster fatigue” when she tested 16 biscuit recipes — “People just couldn’t tell the difference after a certain point” — she now limits contests to a max of 12 recipes.

To prepare for bake-offs, Kwee compiles a master ingredient list for a single grocery-store run, crowdsourcing muffin tins or pie pans when she doesn’t have enough.

She assembles dry ingredients in advance and works off a baking schedule based on the recipes’ heat requirements, sometimes borrowing her landlord’s oven.

From her followers, Kwee’s favorite messages are the ones from data scientists with a penchant for baking, who comb her experiments and tell her the analysis is sound.

“I’m not a data whiz, so I’m always flattered when people who do data as their job find my content valuable,” she said.

Wearing an apron gifted to her by chef-founded brand Hedley & Bennett, Kwee posts slick, professional videos of her process on her new YouTube channel. Recently, she showed the dense, chunky results of her bake-off using copycat recipes of Levain’s dark-chocolate peanut cookies against treats she had shipped from the restaurant.

She’d like to one day expand her taste-bud pool by conducting a bake-off that allows the public to sound off — a larger version of the tastings she hosted at her home pre-pandemic, when 40 or so tasters would spread throughout the rooms, crowding on the floor and enthusiastically comparing notes.

For now, Kwee’s pleasing Instagram posts of 12 iced-and-sprinkled cookies lined up on a pan with her neat, hand-written labels is her way of making the recipe-selecting process more streamlined. In her own way, Kwee is making more approachable the prowess of experts such as Smitten Kitchen.

“I think social media absolutely inspires us to cook more,” Perelman says. “How many times have you been indecisive about what you wanted to cook or eat, or thought you didn’t want to and an image flashed across your screen that made you say, ‘That. I want that.’ Me, all of the time. When it’s from someone who has earned your trust, you’re far more likely to take the risk of trying a new recipe, knowing that it’s unlikely to flop (or) waste your time.”

Allison Bagley is a writer in Houston. Email food@chron.com.