This, from the paper, is a great start on measuring deliciousness. But if you go to that effort, why not provide a benchmark? Such as the existing chocolate chip cookie recipe or the average scores from 10 random chocolate chip cookie recipes?

As a reader, I might suspect that performance was not that great compared to baselines but that the authors were able to mask it by making this qualitative claim ("the cookies were delicious") -- which I'm sure was still true!

But it's worse than the last 100 SOTA models...

This is cute, but "in the authors' opinions, delicious" does not contribute anything to scientific research. Yes, you can use black-box optimization for cookie recipes. No, you should not make any sort of performance claims nor talk about "significant" improvement unless you back it up.