Thanks everyone for taking the Pie vs. Cake Survey! We got a total of 49 responses. Before I get to the results, I'd like to say a few words about the purpose of this survey. This started in Friday's links thread where RMN member FireItUp posted the results of another Pie vs. Cake tournament bracket that started a lot of discussion. Several of us took issue with the results of that contest, and there was interest in doing our own RMN Pie vs. Cake bracket challenge. In order to set up the brackets though, we would need to seed the entries, and I thought the best way to do that would be to survey RMN members ourselves.

So, think of these not so much as the final results of RMN pie/cake preferences, but as a launching point for further discussion. And hopefully, if I or anyone else can find an online bracket template that would allow us to vote on our favorites, we'll ultimately be able to do our very own RMN pie vs. cake tournament challenge (I'm looking into it but no promises).

Team Pie vs. Team Cake

First off, how many of us are Team Pie vs. Team Cake? It was not as close as I imagined. Of the 49 respondents, 25 were Team Pie (51%), 13 were Team Cake (26.5%), and 11 were Neutral or Other (22.4%). Looks like we'll need to start referring to Team Cake as a minority special interest group around here.

Seeding the Cakes

So let's start with the cakes. Here are the responses given to Single Favorite Cake:

I was a bit surprised that carrot cake was so far ahead of the rest, especially given the beating carrot cake took in the comments on Friday. We'll come back to cheesecake in a minute. Also, I got some entertaining trollers. For the most part I removed these from results but I left a few of the entertaining ones.

Now for Top Five Cakes:

I don't have room to post all the cakes that got only a single vote, but rest assured they factored into the seeding if they also got votes elsewhere (there were an additional 21 types of cake that got only a single vote here). Coffee cake got some love here, apparently although it may not be considered a favorite, it is still liked by many. Pound cake too.

Next up are the Least Favorite Cakes:

German Chocolate is quite the polarizing cake, being among the most as well as least favorites. Fruitcake rears its ugly head here.

In order to seed the cakes, I gave each cake 3 points for each Single Favorite vote, 1 point for each Top Five vote, and -3 points for each Least Favorite vote. I took the liberty of combining a few entries, such as "Yellow" and "Yellow with Chocolate Icing". I also left out any cake that was only suggested by one person. I also left out the two generic categories of Birthday and Wedding cake. I know these are loved by some, but they can cover so many actual varieties of cake that it doesn't seem fair to include them here. Finally, I left out Cheesecake. That may anger some of you Cheesecake devotees, but as you'll see it also got votes in Pies, and I think the judicious thing is to leave cheesecake out of the debate altogether. That resulted in 24 cakes, which is convenient for seeding:

I'm open to suggestions if anyone has an issue with my methods. But overall I think this would be a good starting seeding for the cake bracket.

Seeding the Pies

Now for the pies, starting again with the Single Favorites:

Again I was a bit surprised at the love for Key Lime, considering that it's not as much in the standard repertoire as Apple, Pecan, Pumpkin, etc. But you all do love you some key lime pie. Note the cheesecake votes again.

Onto the Top Five Pies:

Wow, Apple was quiet among the favorites, but really took command here. Truly America's pie? Banana Cream also came out of the shadows. Strawberry Rhubarb does better than either Strawberry or Rhubarb, proving that some mergers are truly synergistic. Again I don't have room to list all the single-vote-getters, but there were 17 of them.

Finally the Least Favorites:

The unloved Mincemeat gets thrust upon the plank. Blackbird may have been a joke here, but why not.

I seeded the pies using the same 3,1,-3 point system described above. I combined a few types such as Chocolate, Chocolate Meringue, and Chocolate Cream, although I recognize these aren't necessarily one and the same. As with cakes I left out those that got votes from only one person. Through some judicious combinations I was conveniently able to get the list to exactly 24 pies:

Summary

So there you have it. Our favorite pies and cakes. These would work great as seeds for a 48-entry bracket with pies on one side and cakes on the other. The top 8 seeds on each side would get a first round bye to get down to 32 entries.

I'll look into setting this up. I've found a few sites that offer brackets, but as far as I can tell they are just for recording results, you can't actually vote within the brackets. Maybe we could vote through polls here on RMN (or Survey Monkey) and then I could use the brackets just to show results. I don't know. But I do know I've already spent way too much time on this today, so that will have to wait for another time.

Anyway, please discuss! Let me know if you see any flaws in the seeding system. Remember these are just for starting seeds, the actual bracket votes might not turn out this way.

--Hermus