WHICH PART OF THE BROWNIE DO YOU PREFER?

Edge brownie pan

Those With Specific Tastes Play Favorites With Food
Fans Crave Cereal Marshmallows, Brownie Edges; Scooping Out Bagels

Nathan Wratislaw loves the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms.
Double-stuffed and triple-layered Oreos are among the products that extremely picky eaters have managed to bring to market. (click below to read more)

For years, he shook the box so the crunchy treats came to the top, to increase the density of marshmallows in each bowl. But one day, he decided he didn't want to do it anymore and began searching for extra sweets to add to the cereal.
"They don't have enough marshmallows in cereal. At all," says Mr. Wratislaw, 37 years old, an entrepreneur based in Stevensville, Mont.
After many failed recipes and fruitless searches for the perfect crunch (soft traditional marshmallows won't do), he finally found the perfect supply. He also found an avid following among like-minded gourmands who now buy bags of cereal marshmallows from him. Some recount sad childhood stories of siblings secretly eating more than their fair share—or even all—of the marshmallows, or write blog entries about the sugary concoctions. "I just want the marshmallows, you idiot Leprechaun," wrote one fan.
Everyone has their favorite parts of favorite foods—think the "Seinfeld" episode about muffin tops or people who eat only the middle of an Oreo. Increasingly, food fanatics are finding each other online and going to great lengths to get their favorite parts.
There are Facebook pages that focus on favorite parts of food, like "Oreo company needs to bottle the middles and sell it" and "I love sticking my finger in the cake and eating the frosting." More than 1,000 people like the page, "I love saving the marshmallow in my lucky charms cereal to eat at the end."
Some are even turning their passion into products that make it easier for others to get that best bite.
Meghan Musgnug and Liz Teich, both 28, put their zeal into a bagel scooper. The women, who grew up together on Long Island, came from different paths to the practice of taking out the innards of bagels. Ms. Teich grew up in a family where they scooped out the bagel to cut down on carbs and pile on the lox. "It was a natural thing," says Ms. Teich, a fashion stylist who lives in Brooklyn.

Ms. Musgnug, now a 7th-grade teacher, once had a summer job at a bagel store where customers would come in asking her to scoop out bagels. Without a tool with the gripping power to take out the insides, she had to use her gloved fingers. A toasted bagel often meant melted gloves and burned fingers, she says.
In 2002, the two had a conversation about why Ms. Teich loved scooping and how Ms. Musgnug hated doing it, and an idea was born.
The women played around with different designs and consulted with Ms. Teich's father, an aerospace engineer, about creating a prototype and writing a patent. The end product—a curved, spoon-like device with serrated edges and two heads, one smaller and one larger—is expected to be available at a home-goods retailer early this year, they say.
When it comes to brownies, the battle line often is drawn between lovers of the corner pieces and those who want the middles. Tara Millspaugh, a 39-year-old who works in biotech, refuses to eat the gooey center pieces and had all but given up baking brownies until she discovered a pan that fashioned every square to come with a dense, chewy edge: the Edge Brownie Pan. Now she makes them regularly and gives the pans as gifts.
The product is the brainchild of Matt Griffin, 37, chief executive of Baker's Edge, which makes the pan. He came up with the idea in 1998, fresh out of college and already hating his job as an urban designer. When eating a brownie one day, he says he realized the corner brownies were the best (middle-brownie lovers will disagree) and recruited his now-wife, in school to be a pastry chef, to brainstorm with him. The result: a pan that looks like a maze and sells for $34.95.
Since they started marketing it as a pan just for brownies in 2006, sales have soared. In 2010, it brought in almost $2 million in revenue.
A handful of fanatics have written in to say how they used to swoop in and steal corner pieces from freshly baked batches before discovering the pan, says Mr. Griffin. Customers also have suggested other ideas for the Griffins to pursue, including a "spainer," a spoon with holes to eat cereal without milk, and a doughnut pizza pan, to increase the crust-to-toppings ratio on pizza. Mr. Griffin says he has no current plans to develop these into products.
Andrew Gray's scourge in life wasn't brownies, but milk-saturated soggy cereal. Mr. Gray, 52, who resides in York, England, found himself listening to the complaints of his two children at breakfast over and over until the idea came to him to build a bowl with an internal shelf that prevents the cereal from sitting directly in milk. Called the EatMeCrunchy bowl, it allows users to dunk their cereal in milk when they are ready for it.
"The whole concept was there within 10 seconds," says Mr. Gray, who also is working on inventions to prevent shopping cart thefts from supermarkets and to better clean teeth.
One customer, Gai Klass, an event producer in Marina Del Ray, Calif., bought a bowl for her son. A cereal fan since he was very young who ate lots of it while growing up, he hated his cereal to be soggy, she recalls. He would pour small amounts of cereal at a time into a bowl, then add the milk and eat quickly. She thought the bowl might expedite his eating.
To pursue his marshmallow obsession, Mr. Wratislaw says he contacted makers in China, Mexico and the Netherlands in search of cereal marshmallows, but was always disappointed: "There's confusion between mini-marshmallows and the marshmallows that have the crunch," he says. He even tried to make his own, creating many piles of weird goo before finding a supplier whose marshmallows were "up to code," he says. He declined to identify his supplier.
Since he succeeded in his quest to find a supplier that makes a true cereal marshmallow, his goal has been to sell as many as possible. He says he had to buy more than 1,000 pounds of marshmallows—a semi-truck full—at once.