Recipe takes the cake—and $100,000

Alumna Sharon Collison, CHEP '90, who teaches nutrition concepts at UD, loves to cook and to experiment with cooking. It paid off big time when her chocolate-coffee cheesecake with mocha sauce won the grand prize of $100,000 on Sept. 22 in the Southern Living magazine cook-off.

Her recipe was one of three nationwide selected in the "Southern Desserts" category for which she won $1,000 as a semifinalist. She and her husband, Joe, were flown to Birmingham, Ala., where the magazine is located, for the final cook-off.

"Soon after Joe and I arrived, where we stayed at a lovely resort, I was taken to the Southern Living kitchens because I had to make part of my recipe in advance," Collison says. "The next day, all of us were cooking for an hour and a half. All I had left to do was make the sauce, so I had lots of time to be nervous. After the cooking was complete, our dishes were taken from the kitchens and presented to the judges, who were Southern Living editors.

"When the announcement was made, I was shaking and crying so that the celebrity chef, Tyler Florence, who made the award, said later he had to hold me up. They presented me with a large check—6 feet long—for $100,000 with a real one to follow," Collison says.

To see the prize-winning recipe, go to [southernliving cookoff.com].

As an undergraduate, Collison majored in food science, and she received her master's in nutrition in 1994. She is taking the initial steps toward entering a doctoral program in biomechanics.