My friend Angie Mosier, a gifted local baker, worked with former Rich's bake shop manager Carl Dendy and turned his original recipe into something a home cook might like to try. Like many institutional recipes, it made enough to stock a display case. So Mosier first had to divide the recipe until it produced one cake. Next she had to translate the professional's weight measures for dry ingredients into the home cook's volume measures. Then she had to test it well, because baking ingredients have a tendency to behave a little differently in bulk than they do in single servings.

With Dendy's help, Mosier came up with a fine facsimile of Rich's coconut cake and wrote out the recipe, accidentally transposing the measurements for flour and sugar.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Transposed amounts sabotaged the recipe for Rich's coconut cake that was whittled down from institutional size.

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Oops.

"I wish you could've seen this piece of paper that we were using to do the math on," Mosier said.

I felt bad for her. And I knew exactly what she was going through.

Back when I applied for my first full-time food-writing job, I was working as a chef in Denver. Before I went in for that grueling full day of interviews, I asked everyone I knew if there was anything special I should do for the interview. Buy a new suit? Get a haircut?

"Bring cookies," they all responded.

That made sense. I filled a shoe box with three or four dozen of the white chocolate and raspberry brownies we served at the restaurant. On my way into the building, I presented them to the features editor.

"Hmm. Everyone's brought cookies," she said, tossing the box onto a table. "But thanks."

I went from interview to interview to lunch to more interviews. At one point, a staffer came up to me in the hallway and whispered surreptitiously, "Your cookies were so much better than the snickerdoodles!"

Apparently the last applicant had brought such lousy snickerdoodles that people worried she wouldn't cut it as food editor. I noted with some satisfaction that most of my afternoon interviews started with compliments on my brownies.

On my way out the door, one of the editors came up to me and asked for the recipe.

Uh-oh.

It was a restaurant recipe that involved several pounds of butter, sugar, flour and melted white chocolate combined with a flat of eggs for its base. I folded in a couple of pounds of IQF (individually quick frozen) raspberries, a couple of pounds of chunked white chocolate and a pound of walnuts. I spread the batter over three whole sheet pans lined with parchment and baked the brownies in a convection oven. We left them out overnight to firm up before cutting them.

This batter had so much fat and eggs in it that no leavening was needed. They just kind of slid down your throat.

So what did I do? Stayed up to the morning hours doing math, that's what. I calculated the combined area of three sheet pans and divided it until it equaled the area of a 9-by-13-inch baking pan. I came up with a factor to cut down the ingredients, wrote up the recipe on a homey card and popped it into a thank you note.

Two weeks later I got the job. On my first day, the editor told me the recipe made so much batter it wouldn't fit in the pan. She tried to work with it, but ended up throwing out two batches.

Sooner or later, they figured, I'd learn to write a recipe.

16 servings (three thin 9-inch layers or two thicker 9-inch layers)
Hands on: 30 minutes
Total time: 50-60 minutes

Shortening and flour for pans
2 1/4 cups cake flour (if you can't find cake flour, use White Lily brand all-purpose flour)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon powdered milk
1/2 cup water
2/3 cup liquid milk (2 percent or whole)
3/4 cup vegetable shortening
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs

Rich's Bakeshop Icing

16 servings
Hands on: 10 minutes
Total time: 10 minutes

1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
1 pound confectioners' sugar
2 tablespoons powdered milk
1/2 cup water (for dissolving milk powder)

Rich's Bakeshop Coconut Cake

16 servings
Hands on: 20 minutes
Total time: 1 1/2 hours

2 pounds frozen shredded coconut (sweetened or unsweetened — both Angie Mosier and John Kessler tested it with unsweetened), divided
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 or 3 layers Rich's Bakeshop Yellow Cake (see recipe)
1 batch Rich's Bakeshop Icing (see recipe)