What kind of gimmicks? Here are two that seem to be popular right now:
- Put bacon in it! Anything! Everything! (I like bacon. But it doesn’t belong everywhere, and sometimes, a pretty lousy recipe gets passed around the interwebs just because somebody sprinkled bacon bits in it.)
- Pour booze on it! Any kind of dessert, soaked with alcohol, must be good! (I’m all for using ingredients, including some with alcohol, to add layers of flavor to dessert. One of my favorite chocolate cakes ever features a cup of stout. But people want to feel like they ate dessert, not like they did shots. And no amount of alcohol is going to rescue that recipe from the fact that it started with packaged pudding mix, my friend.
We all seem to have recovered from the “if you put it on a stick, no one cares that it tastes like canned frosting and packaged cake mix” delirium that we suffered back in 2009. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past with new materials.
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