January 3: Pound Cake

My first cake-baking-Saturday has arrived and only a pound cake will do.  I have decided that there is no single, perfect pound cake recipe.  Each recipe book I have read, even those dating back to the nineteenth century, has more than one recipe for pound cake.  I used to wonder why.  I thought it was baker's hubris that made so many think that theirs was the fool-proof version that everyone needed.  I was overwhelmed by the different versions.  For years, I begged my great-aunt Roxie for her recipe (she never gave it up, even after I put my Granna up to asking her for it).  But after I got married, I realized that the success of a pound cake recipe is solely determined by the audience.

Every family has their own definition of what makes the perfect pound cake; it might even lead to a dispute, with each person in a family having a different preference.  Is your favorite pound cake fine-crumbed and smooth?  Or dense and moist?  Slightly dry and begging to be toasted with butter or covered with fruit?  Is the crust nutty brown with crunchy edges?  Or is it caramel brown and moist like the cake inside?  Cake flour?  Or all-purpose?  What kind of all-purpose? Southern soft wheat?  Or Yankee-fied unbleached?

Keith's favorite cake in the entire world is pound cake.  Period.  After we married I made several pound cakes from various recipes; my mom's recipe from decades ago, recipes from magazines and books.  None of these seemed like THE ONE.  Keith likes his pound cake dense and moist to the point of having a texture almost like a "sad spot."  My mom referred to a spot in the middle of a homemade pound cake that didn't turn out just right or seemed undercooked as a "sad spot."  It didn't make the cake bad, just imperfect, and the girls of family Allgood strive for picture-perfect results!  It made me crazy that Keith's favorite part of the cake was the part I always considered an imperfection.

So, I kept searching.  We Allgood girls have often relied on recipes printed in The Farmers & Consumers Market Bulletin from the Georgia Department of Agriculture.  The recipes in the bulletin always resided on the Bulletin's newsprint pages alongside classified advertisements for farm equipment, foals, piglets, chicks, seeds or bulk pecans.  Every recipe was submitted by a reader of the bulletin and I have never had a bad result from one.  So, I turned to the Market Bulletin to find a recipe for a Keith-kind of pound cake.  The recipe for Whipping Cream Pound Cake came close to his ideal, but still needed a few alterations and additions to make it perfect.  I finally got it!  I even made a few more alterations and made a perfect gluten-free version.

The top crust turned-out a little uneven in color this time (first Saturday Cake nerves?)

Next Saturday, in honor of my great-grandmother Lexie, I shall make a caramel cake.  It will be my first ever attempt at this Southern classic.