I spent that morning obsessively surfing www.bakeoff.com, and by afternoon I had decided to enter.

The deadline was in October, which made my summer an unexpected adventure in buying bulk-sized packages of brown sugar and cocoa, sweating over the stove, and seeing the Pathmark clerk more often than my boyfriend Paul. I turned into a regular Betty Crocker: When I wasn't baking, I was thinking about baking. Or researching recipes. Or serving slices of pie to friends and asking, "Would this appeal to Americans nationwide?"

"THIS IS A HEALTHY CONTEST and a highly American one. It may sell Pillsbury flour but it also reaches far down into the lives of the housewives of America." -- Eleanor Roosevelt, "My Day," syndicated newspaper column, December 15, 1949

Pillsbury's first baking contest was held in 1949, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. It was considered such a smash that the company repeated it the next year, and the next, and so on through 1976, when it became an every-other-year affair. The categories have been changed, the prize money increased, and the list of eligible products radically revised, but in many ways the contest has remained remarkably consistent: Entrants from around the country submit recipes that use Pillsbury ingredients, and 100 of them receive a deluxe trip to the finals, which take place in a different city each year. For a scant few, frenetic hours, the contestants are asked to be housewives: to chop and sift and mix and bake, reproducing their creations for the judges in a brightly lit, oven-hot hotel ballroom, outfitted with 100 individual cooking stations. The rest of the weekend, they are treated like queens; the servers become the serviced.

Although the 1949 grand prize went to a modest cinnamon-nut bread twist, the Bake-Off has become synonymous with elaborate, decadent desserts: French Silk Chocolate Pie, the evocatively named Tunnel of Fudge Cake (credited with popularizing the Bundt pan), Hershey's Kiss-topped Peanut Blossom cookies. The top-prize winner in 1996 was a complicated confection involving cake mix, chocolate filling, pureed pears, a crumbly macadamia-nut topping and caramel sauce -- served à la mode.

But as Pillsbury has searched for ways to sustain the contest from the postwar era to a postfeminist age, it has re-examined the Bake-Off's dessert heritage. "There isn't a lack of recipes for making wonderful, four-hour indulgence desserts," explains Marlene Johnson, Pillsbury's director of product communications, who points out that most people have a whole drawerful of dessert recipes that they never make anyway. "But when we went out and talked to consumers about what they would really like to get from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, we heard a lot of interest in things to cook for dinner tonight. ... What worked for my mother -- who was a stay-at-home mom -- the roast beef that she made for Thursday dinner, I can't do. And so I'm looking for the very quick something I can make, that my family still likes."

As a result, the main-dish and other savory categories -- complete with the gimmicky names that are unavoidable on the food-contest circuit -- have become an increasingly important part of the Bake-Off repertoire. This year, my fellow contestants and I are competing for honors not just in "Fast & Fabulous Desserts & Treats," but also "Easy Weeknight Meals," "Casual Snacks & Appetizers" and "Yummy Vegetables." Prep-time restrictions have been imposed to drive the convenience message home. Pillsbury's Best flour, the lone required ingredient at the first Bake-Offs, is no longer even an eligible product -- entrants must now choose from refrigerated doughs, canned and frozen vegetables, and box mixes instead. The focus has changed from scratch and elegance to speed and ease.

While the Bake-Off is usually considered a heartland enterprise (Paul's mother assumed all the winners must hail from flyover states, or, as she put it, "where they read Woman's Day"), Pillsbury's convenience spin is ready-made for the urban dinner-to-go lifestyle. Regardless, efforts to keep the contest in pace with the times, and developments like the increasing number of men who enter (1998 had 14 male finalists, more than any other year), have done little to change most people's impressions. "The Bake-Off still symbolizes an era of postwar optimism," says syndicated foodwriter Marialisa Calta. "It's emblematic of progress: all those women at their gleaming electric ranges. Electric ranges! Those were a big thing. It has a very wholesome aura -- and I mean that in a noncynical way -- this image of people trying to feed their families in the best way they can."

Of course, I'm not trying to feed my family, but entering the Bake-Off still carried me over the threshold into a suburban, ranch-style way of being. And it's an odd fit -- when I told friends I was entering the Pillsbury Bake-Off, they were surprised, but most of them thought it was cool. Paul's mom may envision housewives in Wisconsin creaming Crisco and sugar with harvest gold electric mixers, but 20- and 30-something urbanites endow the Bake-Off with throwback kitsch cachet. It seems quaint. I might as well tell them I've joined the Junior League.

But then it all seems a bit less ironic when I tell them the grand prize is a million dollars. As recently as 1994, the top prize was only $50,000, but in 1996, Pillsbury adjusted for jackpot inflation. The move was in part designed to erase any doubt -- if ever there was any -- about Pillsbury's dominance among food competitions. "It's the biggest and the best of the cooking contests, and we wanted to make sure that our prize really reflected that," says Johnson, the Bake-Off spokesperson. "We just felt that if we were going to make a statement about how big a deal the Pillsbury Bake-Off was, the prize money was one way to do it."

"THINK BACK TO FOODS from your childhood; then adapt them for today." -- Tips for creating a winner, www.bakeoff.com

After I decided to enter the contest, there was the little matter of what to bake. My primary goal was to get to the finals, so I thought about playing the percentages. Desserts and treats are far sexier than vegetables, so I figured my chances might improve if I took the less-traveled leafy green route. But the logical approach proved futile; the lure of creating a fabulous signature dessert was irresistible. After a rocky start experimenting with cookie bars ("They're very... sweet," said one friend, who refused to meet my eye and quickly changed the subject), I decided to modify a family recipe for an old Southern favorite: chess pie. My mom made a chocolate version so delicious that she, my dad, my brother, and I could polish one off in a sitting. I made it once years ago for Paul, a frustrated mocha fanatic who feels that anything chocolate would be better with coffee in it, and ever since he'd been begging me to adapt it to fit his mocha-world vision.

So I started out one night with my mom's old batter-stained recipe card, Joy of Cooking's substitution tables, a calculator, and a notebook. After a trip to the 24-hour supermarket, I got down to it. Due to a fatal error I had to dump the first pot of chocolate in the garbage, but I adjusted my technique -- it's all in the wrist -- and put the pie in the oven around 1 AM. It cooked, then cooled overnight, and Paul and I had mocha chess pie v.1 for breakfast the next day. He was immediately enthusiastic -- "The mocha revolution has begun!" -- but I identified at least three issues that needed addressing: sweetness, sogginess, and consistency.

Over the next month, I baked the pie seven more times, making first major, then minor adjustments -- more butter one time, less sugar another, prebaking the crust, changing the oven temperature. I stopped by the grocery store almost every day. To garner feedback, I took the pie with me everywhere: "Happy birthday! Here's a pie." "Wanna meet for dinner? I'll bring pie." When possible, I would serve two different versions to willing taste-testers, asking them to respond to a battery of questions the Bake-Off web site suggested: Does it taste good? Does it have a pleasing texture? Would it appeal to the whole family? And the all-important, Would it appeal to Americans nationwide?

I thought about the pie all the time.

I'm told that 24-7 concentration is a winning approach. Gladys Fulton, a retiree who took the grand prize in the 1992 Bake-Off, says she would lie awake in bed thinking about her recipe -- and it turns out she had plenty to think about. "It didn't turn out the way I was visualizing it," she says of her Pennsylvania Dutch Cake and Custard Pie. "I thought the pie filling and the cake would intermingle, but instead, the cake rises up. It was a surprise to me." She speculates that it was the unusual cake-pie-combo aspect of her recipe that caught the judges' eye.

She's probably right about that. Tens of thousands of entries are received for each Bake-Off (the company won't be more specific), and of those, only 800 to 1,000 are prepared and evaluated. Some of the initial recipes don't adhere to the rules and are DQed from the get-go, but many more are tossed simply because they're unexceptional. "People sometimes have misconceptions that the recipe doesn't have to be original," says Sally Peters, who has worked for Pillsbury for 23 years and directed Bake-Off recipe evaluation for the last 12. "We're not looking for another recipe for chocolate-chip cookies. It has to be a new idea."

Like, say, Salsa Reuben Dip. Seventy-year-old Martha Davis earned a finalist berth in 1996 with her dubious-sounding sauerkraut-Swiss-n-salsa crudité dip. "This is the best recipe I have ever come up with. It is absolutely delicious," insists Martha, who enters lots of contests but likes Pillsbury's best. "The Bake-Off's the grandmother of them all. It's just super," she says. "They spare no expense just to show you a good time."

In talking to Martha I began to accept the possibility that I might be in for a decades-long endeavor. She had tried for 18 years before being tapped for the 1996 contest (and then was chosen again for the next Bake-Off, with a cornbread-pinenut appetizer). Dorothy Campbell, a widow, entered the contest off and on beginning in the 1960s before her Ham 'N Swiss Biscuit Buns were selected for the 1998 finals in Orlando. It was worth the wait: She was wowed by her "fabulous hotel room," a group excursion to Epcot Center, and the opportunity to meet members of the Pillsbury family. "We were treated like celebrities," Dorothy says. "They took us to dinner at a place called Planet... Planet Something. Planet Hollywood. And there were people standing in line, but we just walked right in."

In talking to Dorothy I began to accept the possibility that, were I to become a finalist, I might be in for a decades-long weekend. I tried to imagine myself strolling into Planet Hollywood with 99 widows and retirees. A shared competitive spirit and love of food prep struck me as a fairly narrow base for dinner and specialty-cocktail conversation. I began to see the ways in which I might differ from the average Bake-Off entrant: To me, the appeal of the contest is in the labor, not the luxury. It's in the challenge of creating something perfect, and then reproducing it perfectly. I don't want to spend the weekend at Epcot, I want to spend it at my individual cooking station.

A WEEK BEFORE THE ENTRY deadline I made mocha chess pie v.8, called -- at Paul's insistence -- La Vida Mocha Chess Pie (see above re: the inevitability of gimmicky names). I baked it for my parents, and, after so many tweaks and repetitions, I could not even face it when it came out of the oven. Everything about it made me sick. My parents said it was delicious.

Baking is a loaded issue. When I think about it -- even still, six months into the Bake-Off mindset -- I envision a freshly permed mother in a starched apron, taking a perfectly timed tray of snickerdoodles from the oven just as her children clamber off the school bus. A woman whose sense of self is bound up in the height of her cakes and the flakiness of her pie crusts. The Doughboy may say, "Nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven," but I think he's leaving out an important part of the equation. Those cookies have just as much to do with a desire to be lovable.

I don't really think this snickerdoodle mom ever existed. (When foodwriter Calta begins to sound vaguely wistful about the early Bake-Off days, she's quick to add: "We have to be careful about confusing nostalgia with reality.") And I certainly don't want to be her, which is a good thing: By the time I kissed my recipe and sent it off to its fate at the hands of the Pillsbury crew, my entire attitude about baking had changed. I used to be a pinch-here-dash-there kind of cook, now I'm maniacal about precision. I once whipped up dishes for immediate enjoyment, now I worry about replicability. For the millions of women who will read the winning Bake-Off recipes next March -- right alongside the coupons for Crescent Dinner Rolls and Creamy Supreme Frosting in the Sunday paper -- baking may in fact be primarily about feeding the family quickly and well. But for the tens of thousands of us who entered, it's a pretty self-directed exercise. For me, baking is no longer about pleasure, hearth or home -- it's about making the best damn pie ever.

Which is just what I did. Now I'm simply sitting by the telephone, awaiting Pillsbury's confirmation.

Alleen Barber is an editor and writer who lives in Brooklyn.