Jellybean Contest : Whipping Up a Winning Recipe Was Easy as 1,2,3

If you like cake but hate to bake, this may be news for you. And if you’re also from New York and sometimes ache for the flavors of home, it’s good news indeed.

Forty-six thousand recipes for the world’s favorite treats were entered in a contest held by an Oakland candy company. Not one of them called for cracking an egg, whipping anything to a fluff or preheating an oven to 450 degrees.

In this contest you didn’t need a pineapple to make pineapple upside-down cake or chocolate pudding to make chocolate mint pie. All you needed was jellybeans.

No Egg, No Cream

The recipe judged the best came from Lynne Selbst of Simi Valley. She didn’t need an egg or cream to make New York egg cream. Nor did she need chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer water, the things the soda-fountain drink is made of where she comes from, Selbst said.

Her recipe is simply this:

“Take two chocolate pudding Jelly Belly beans plus one cream soda Jelly Belly bean. Eat them together.”

For that she won a trip for two to Hawaii.

The results, announced last week, revealed that she beat out, among other recipes, the pineapple upside-down “cake”: two pineapple, one very cherry and one coconut Jelly Bellies.

Sponsor’s Ingredients

As is probably clear by now, the only rule in this patently promotional contest staged by the Herman Goelitz Candy Co. was that the ingredients consist entirely of the sponsor’s jellybeans.

Selbst, the office manager for a Simi Valley dentist, wasn’t hindered by the limitation. Her boss told her it’s OK to eat jellybeans if you brush your teeth afterward. And she had already concocted the winning recipe as compensation for a much more serious deprivation.

“I’m a former New Yorker,” Selbst said, adding that the egg cream is something “you cannot get here at all. . . . It’s a definite taste that, unless you are from back East and have had it before, you can’t describe.”

For some reason, she said, two chocolate pudding Jelly Belly beans and one soda cream Jelly Belly bean, eaten at once, bring back the sensation of everything but the drink’s fizz.

Hoped for Second Prize

Although the prize may sound generous for such a simple recipe, it wasn’t what Selbst wanted. She said she entered the contest hoping to win second prize. The 24 entrants who did will each get a pound of jellybeans every month for a year.

Selbst was going to give them to her father, who she said is a jellybean nut.

But she said she would make the most of what she got.

“My dad said, ‘Since you didn’t get me the jellybeans you should take me to Hawaii,’ ” she said. “My mom said, ‘You should take me because I’m your mom.’ My husband just naturally assumed I was taking him.

“I’m not going to take the trip right away. I’m going to use it as a negotiating wedge whenever I want something else.”