I like to keep things simple. My favorite meal is a grilled petite filet mignon, with a baked potato and butter, a small green salad, and a tasty bottle of red wine. Dessert should be simple, too. A wholesome slice of freshly baked cake usually does the trick. For Mother’s Day I suggest baking a poundcake, which can be served plain, or gussied up with whipped cream, or ice cream, with fruit, drizzled with lemon icing or chocolate sauce. It is a veritable tabula rasa; a Moleskine notebook of a dessert – it is plain and simple, and speaks volumes of love. And best of all, it is easy to bake. This is how we celebrate.
In my mind poundcake is straightforward and uncomplicated, provided you use the best ingredients you can find. I am not suggesting that you get in the car and drive to Whole Foods, or that you should make an expedition to deepest darkest Brooklyn for artisanal ground-by-former-finance-majors flour. Use good cake flour, excellent butter and super duper farm-fresh eggs. And if you add vanilla, be sure it is pure vanilla extract; no imitations, please.
I don’t know if I read about poundcake in the Little House books, but I have the impression that poundcake (in the idealized world of my childhood imagining) consisted of a pound of each ingredient: butter, sugar, flour and eggs. I somehow doubt if the Ingalls family ever had a pound of butter, a pound of sugar and a pound of flour at any one time, such was their hard-scrabble life, but it comforts me to think of Laura and Ma baking poundcake together when the spelling bee was won.
In her new book, Cake, Alyssa Levene writes about the evolution of cake. And according to her, my imagined pound cake would really have been a four-pound cake. Imagine that! So many of leftovers! Levene outlines the basic building blocks of cake: fat, eggs, sugar and flour. To which we can add any number of ingredients to distinguish cakes for particular events: candles, chocolate, nuts, fruit, icing, carrots, custard, toffee, rum, mousse, lemon juice or even rose water!
Helpful hints: Use room temp butter and eggs, and be sure to sift the cake flour. And then let your imagination run wild and free. Lightly beat the eggs before adding them to the creamed butter and sugar to get volume, as you want a light, lofty and tender cake, and you are not using any baking soda.
This New York Times recipe for “Lost-and-Found Lemon Poundcake” calls for nearly equal weight measurements of butter, sugar and flour. It also calls for using confectioners’ sugar instead of granulated or extra fine sugar. I love the touch of lemon which always makes me think of spring. I’ve been walking Luke the wonder dog these last few days and have been inhaling spring smells. People have started to mow their grass. The cut green wafts sweetly, and reminds me of cool spring nights in college.
Martha’s minion uses regular granulated sugar. https://www.marthastewart.com/337155/vanilla-pound-cake
My mother was a real fan of King Arthur’s flour: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/king-arthur-flours-original-pound-cake-recipe
But remember, our Secret Family Recipe for brownies came from the side of the Baker’s Chocolate box… (https://www.backofthebox.com/recipes/desserts/one-bowl-brownies-g.html)
“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
– Erma Bombeck
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