Google AI is going on a dessert face-off with the winner of the Great British Bake Off

Baking is part science and part art and to figure out what is more important, We are soon going to see Google Cloud AI taking on the winner of the Great British Bake Off winner, in a dessert face-off.

Sara Robinson is an amateur baker and a Google Cloud developer advocate who has built a machine learning (ML) model that has examined hundreds of baking recipes to help her create a new one, according to reports.

This ML model has generated lists of ingredients and amounts that are used as the bases for step-by-step recipes and was able to come up with hybrid recipes. Robinson picked one that had a ML-generated cake batter on top of a ML-generated cookie.

She tried out this recipe to create a dessert that includes Maltesers (a malt chocolate candy) to create the Maltesers AI Cakes (4d6172730a), “the last bit is hexadecimal for ‘Mars’, which owns the Maltesers brand”. This company had approached Google to create an AI-driven dessert.

On the other hand, Peter Sawkins, the winner of the Great British Bake Off 2020, has created his own Maltesers cake to compete with the AI. All of this is a part of a promotional campaign.

Both Sawkins and Robinson have used slightly “unusual” ingredients to balance out the sweetness of the chocolate with umami and salt. While Robinson used Marmite-infused buttercream frosting “after Google Trends identified that ‘Is Marmite sweet or savoury’ as the top search result related to ‘sweet and salty’", Sawkins added soy sauce to his recipe, something he has adapted from one of his mother’s creations.

You can download both Robinson’s ML-generated recipe and Swakins’ recipe and try them out at home to see which you like more. And you can also have the ML model come up with a fresh new recipe for you at this promotional website.