Hi Irene! Thank you for your thoughtful comments -- perhaps I should have clarified further that it wasn't just the frosting recipe that we spent months developing, but rather the entire 2019 Recipe of the Year recipe for Classic Birthday Cake. And happily I can vouch for it not being an exaggeration! The development that goes into creating and selecting our recipe of the year each year is often much more extensive than our regular recipe development process. That's because there's more than just making sure the recipe works and tastes delicious (as you point out, with our stellar test kitchen team, that usually doesn't take them very long!) -- a recipe like a classic birthday cake is a very nostalgic treat, and everyone has strong opinions about what is "the best". So we spent months trying various iterations of the recipes, gathering feedback from lots of taste testers and bakers, and tweaking slightly from there. We wanted a recipe that wasn't just "a great cake and frosting recipe" but a recipe we could confidently say is the "ultimate yellow cake with chocolate frosting" and that we knew a wide audience would feel the same way about. Hope that gives a little more background about what made the process of choosing this recipe so special! -Posie

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