2025 was a tough year for pretty much everyone I know, and I imagine the coming year will bring more of the same dreary news. I thought I would start off 2026 with something much dumber. I have plumbed the depths and found the bottom of the deepest of barrels, and that is how you are reading an “I asked ChatGPT” post.

There is a minor point here. I needed to use up a cup of milk and a quarter-cup of sour cream lurking in my fridge, and I wanted to make some kind of quick bread or loaf with it. The problem is that I am an inexperienced baker and I do not have a great sense of the proportion of other ingredients I would need.

I think this is the kind of thing a more advanced search engine could help with. I have previously used recipe finder tools like Supercook and RecipeRadar but, while they often ask what ingredients are available, they usually do not do so in specific quantities, necessitating looking through a bunch of recipes to find one that fits. Something that can process longer natural language queries seems tailor made for this kind of task.

I told it “I would like loaf/quick bread recipes that will use up 1 cup of milk and ¼ cup of sour cream”, and ChatGPT gave me four options. The first, a “classic vanilla quick bread”, looked adequate, but boring. (Also, a careful reader will quibble with its “optional add-ins (1–1½ cups total)” after which is a list of, among other things, cinnamon, and I do not think you should add a whole cup of cinnamon to anything.) I do like cinnamon, though, and I settled on the fourth suggestion, a “cinnamon swirl coffee bread”. Here is the entirety of its recipe:

Batter

2 cups flour ¾ cup sugar 1½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 1 cup milk ¼ cup sour cream ⅓ cup oil 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla

Swirl

⅓ cup brown sugar 1½ tsp cinnamon

Bake

Layer batter + swirl in pan, gently knife once

350°F for 50–60 min

The ingredient list, to my untrained eye, seems fine. The instructions are obviously incoherent. More comprehensive directions were offered for the “classic vanilla quick bread” above it, which I missed because I only followed this recipe. Since I made a different loaf recently, however, I had a rough idea of what I should do. Also, I made a couple of minor changes:

I substituted vanilla extract for a few dashes of Fee Brothers’ cardamom bitters.

I had no ground cinnamon on hand and grating a cinnamon stick is tedious, so I stopped after about a teaspoon.

While these ingredient substitutions might affect the flavour, they would not materially affect the chemistry.

The resulting loaf is fine. I was hoping for either catastrophic failure or incredible success to more wholly justify this low-effort post, but it was just fine. Better than I expected, given where it came from, though the brown sugar swirl is achingly sweet and settled in the middle despite my best attempts. I still do not know what “gently knife once” is supposed to mean. I would not confuse this with a professional baker’s work, of course, but that is more like operator error. I wish the directions were, overall, clearer; if I had little to no previous experience baking a quick bread, I might have been lost.

I have experimented with ChatGPT and food before, particularly for weekly meal planning, and I have never been satisfied with its results. This, though, worked pretty well for me. I got to use up a couple of things in my fridge and made an okay dessert from it. Happy New Year.