Lately, I have been craving one of my mom's pound cakes. They were pretty much the only thing she could cook without burning down her own kitchen, but when she died last summer, I assumed the cakes died with her. My grandmother, aka Chain Smoking Granny, had the recipe tucked away in a drawer, but she won't put the Virginia Slims down long enough to cook, and don't even get me started on the condition of her kitchen. You need to wear a Hazmat suit just to make a peanut butter and jelly.
My sister is a halfway decent cook, but Her Highness and I aren't exactly besties so if I were to ask her to make me one and mail it to me, I'm sure it would come with a little extra something special (spit, snot, just fill in your choice of bodily fluid). Consequently, if I wanted a pound cake I could eat and not die from, I was either going to have to buy it or make it myself.
Today I set about trying to make it. I didn't understand what half the directions meant, and I had never used a mixer before today, but eventually I managed to make this:
Please ignore the big hole in the top. The cake was only supposed to take an hour and 15 minutes to cook, but I apparently bought the wrong kind of pan because mine was nowhere near done at that time. For the next 30 minutes or so, I would take the cake out, check it, and pinch a little more off to see if it was done before putting it back in.
Okay, that's what the toothpick was for. I pinched it off because I wanted to and because the crust is the best part, but it was for the cake's own good, I swear.
By the time the pound cake was fully cooked, I had basically made a hole all the way through the bottom. Thanks to my pinching, it may not be the prettiest pound cake you'll ever see (that hole kind of looks like any angry mouth, doesn't it), but it doesn't taste half bad. I think it could have used a little more vanilla, even though I put the exact amount listed on the recipe, but otherwise it tasted like the cakes my mom used to make. (It was her recipe, but she was an eyeballer when it came to following it, which might explain the slight taste differential.)
Now it's just a waiting game to see if I gave myself food poisoning. I'm not venturing far from the bathroom tonight just in case.
