Every month at Campfire we set aside some time to celebrate birthdays and work anniversaries. It usually happens in the office on a Friday after our weekly all-hands meeting and this Friday is the last celebration of the year. Spoiler alert: We’re having Ina Garten’s double chocolate layer cake (pictured below).
It started with peanut butter cookies (these Smitten Kitchen peanut butter cookies to be exact) and snowballed from there. Before I knew it I was suggesting we have a monthly birthday celebration, knowing full well that if I was suggesting it then I was also volunteering to plan and organize it. Everyone got a recurring meeting invite and I started making plans to try new recipes that I’d saved.
I learned a lot about my colleagues in the course of celebrating them for a year. Lots of folks had never had homemade ice cream, Taylor loves peanut butter anything, Justin is all about caramel, Robert’s favorite cookie is chocolate chip, and both Bill and Nick don’t like cherry pie. A tres leches cake I expected to be left half uneaten in the fridge was one of the biggest hits of the year.
I thought it would be fun to look back on the recipes I made for birthday celebrations this year so I put together a Tableau dashboard using the recipe ingredients.
Here are a few of my favorite findings:
Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen and Ina Garten are my go-to recipe sources.
I used 3 dozen eggs, over 6.5 pounds of butter, and nearly 9 pounds of sugar.
I went through the equivalent of two bottles vanilla extract.
The mean quantity of chocolate called for was 9.2 ounces, but the median quantity was 6 ounces.
Granulated sugar was the most frequently used ingredient and was included in 9 out of 10 recipes.
If I wasn’t sure how people would respond to the dessert I wanted to bring, I hedged my risk by also bringing in the peanut butter cookies.
I’m looking forward to another year of trying out new recipes to celebrate the fabulous people that make up the team here at Campfire Analytics!
Double chocolate layer cake, as mentioned above.