Do you want to hear something quasi-heretical for a Southerner to say?
I don’t really care for pound cake.
Of all the cakes that are out there that could possibly be made and enjoyed, the humble pound cake is just not one of my go-tos. And that’s a shame because there’s a lot to love in this base cake. It can be made with things that any baker already has in their cabinet. It can be classed up with a glaze or a filling. It can be made lighter or creamier with the addition of sour cream or cream cheese. But for whatever reason, it just has never spoken to me. Which is why the response to this cake was so baffling.
So when I was endeavoring to make this poundcake, I was in the middle of an unexpectedly busy couple of weeks at work. A lot of projects, team members with things going on, finishing up an article…there was just lots in the work. So I wanted to make something that I knew I could do relatively simply. And I wanted to go for a sure thing. So I turned to Ina.
Ina Garten, better known as the Barefoot Contessa, is a cookbook author and television food personality. She’s published 12 cookbooks and 275 episodes of her television show. Oh, and before all of that, she got her pilot’s license. And worked in the OMB under the Carter administration as a budget analyst for nuclear policy. She flipped homes in her spare time until she bought the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store. And she is my go-to cookbook author.
I catered by wedding out of The Barefoot Contessa Parties. I own six of the cookbooks, and virtually everything I’ve made has turned out well. Her food is meticulously tested. And even though she’s devoted a good chunk of her life to cooking, she is not a classically trained chef. She’s the ideal version of what a home cook could be, were we ridiculously driven, financially independent, and surrounded by helpers and people who want to be entertained. Ina is known for her catchphrase “Homemade is better, but store bought is fine.” I love this article’s take on it. Because of course store bought is fine; Ina would never judge us. She’s thrilled we’re cooking along. But for her? Oh, she would never. Ina has day old bread to pulse down into bread crumbs to bread the chicken for tonight which she bought from a local butcher. But Ina understands that I’ve got a commute and a paper due on populist governments responses to COVID-19, so for me, store bought is fine.
I could talk Ina forever. But back to the cake. I wanted a recipe I knew wouldn’t fail. So I went for the perfect poundcake. Now, this recipe made me do something I don’t like doing: buying stuff that I’m don’t have lots of multi-uses for as ingredients. But with such a simple recipe, I figured that the details mattered, so I jumped in. Turbinado sugar. Cake flour. Extra large eggs.
The recipe calls for the flour and salt to be sifted three times, for the eggs to be room temperature, and for the zest of two oranges to be thrown in for flavor. I did all of that. What I did not do was buy cooking spray that had flour in like she instructed. I figured I had normal cooking spray and that would do. Because I thought I knew better than Ina.
You see, into the spray on the outer edges of my bundt pan went an outer layer of turbinado sugar. As the cake baked, the sugar melted slightly into a crust, but that meant that it also adhered to the pan. So I had to whack the pan. Run a knife around the edge. Whack it again. And then I dropped the pan upside down on the counter to shake the cake loose. Some of it remained in the pan, but most of the cake came out. Were there more flour there, it may not have stuck as badly as mine did. It wasn’t unsalvageable, but it wasn’t Ina-perfect.
So how did the cake turn out? I liked it. It had a good sponge. Nice chewy texture. The orange zest gives it a lift. The crust is a nice touch. I thought it was a pretty good pound cake.
But when I served it to other people? They were rhapsodic over it. Numerous people stopping by my office to compliment the cake. Slack messages. Someone telling me that in fifty years that’s the best pound cake they had ever had. Curious inquiries as to what makes the crust so good (it’s sugar…the good part is always sugar). So, I guess the proof is in the bake.
Ina is not Southern. But then again, neither is the pound cake (probably originated in the 1700’s in Northern Europe). So this will probably be my go to recipe for quite some time.
