A while back, reader Winnie Thomas called to say she'd misplaced an Advertiser recipe she dearly loved. It was called Coffee Cake — not coffeecake, as in what you serve with brunch, but a yellow cake flavored with coffee, she explained. And here's the part I loved: I always tell readers that the more you can tell me about a recipe the more likely I am to be able to find it, even in The Advertiser's crazy pre-computer filing system.

Here's what she remembered: that the man who sent it in was in the National Guard and there was a picture of him. That gave me a clue: If it was sent in by a reader and appeared with a picture, it was probably from the My Best Recipe series coordinated by former food editor Patsy Matsuura for four years in the 1990s.

Lots of chores got in the way, but I finally had the time last week to spend a couple of hours indexing the recipes that appeared in My Best Recipe from 1990 to 1993 (now I'll be able to find these easily when someone needs one of them).

Sure enough, on April 17, 1993, we ran a recipe for Kelvin Yoda's Coffee Cake. According to Patsy's story, Yoda wasn't in the National Guard; he worked, at the time, in computer maintenance at the Air National Guard headquarters, and he loved to bake. His sister, Mary Ann, submitted the recipe, which was one of the contest's weekly winners.

Here it is:

COFFEE CAKE