Best Damn Pound Cake

Slice of amazing pound cake.

A while back I bought a book at the amazing A Southern Season, which I'm delighted to see has a nice website, on the science of baking. Bakewise, by Shirley O. Corriher, is a big fat book that promised me it would teach me the hows and whys of baking.

I love baking. I don't like to cook, generally, because I'm too impatient and I want food, dammit, but I find that baking is generally delicious every step of the way. Also I have an incurable sweet tooth.

Like everything else I enjoy doing, I would like to bake better. I have ideas of perfection in my head, and am consistently disappointed in the shortcomings of my various efforts. Every time I discover that I am not Martha Stewart, I am somehow surprised. Being occasionally methodical, I figured a book that explains how to be a better baker rather than just giving a bunch of recipes (at least half of which generally suck) would be just the ticket.

Naturally the book sat around untouched for a year or so. But here I am in Jersey, friendless, bored, and perpetually in search of something to eat. Bam, Bakewise. The first recipe discussed, as an illustration of the necessity of balance in baking, is pound cake. I like pound cake well enough, though it often disappoints me, so I thought I'd give Shirley's Even Greater American Pound Cake a try.

It's a bundt.

The ingredient list is complicated, involving butter and shortening and oil, flour and potato starch. Actually, I was surprised to be unable to find the potato starch at my nearby grocery store, considering that this neighborhood has a significant Jewish population - Corriher gave the helpful hint that it is generally found in the kosher section, which was oddly small at that store. Anyway. The recipe had a lot of stuff in it, but the directions were helpfully explicit and I followed them faithfully. It's generally quite difficult for me to follow directions faithfully unless it is the very first time I do something alien to me. Cakes - I modify those babies all the time. Which is probably why they fall apart so often.

This cake did not fall apart, except for that one tiny section that didn't come out of the pan correctly, because I used the wrong spray (okay, I followed it mostly faithfully). It came out looking quite nice. It baked for just under an hour - I may need to check my oven temperature. I applied the glaze as suggested and let it sit for 24 hours. Then I cut it.

This cake has a hole in it.

Holy crap, it is perfect. The texture and consistency are absolutely perfect, and the taste is just right, with that faint hint of almond. It is nicely sweet, and the glaze is the perfect compliment (though I used less than half of it, since it stopped soaking in). This pound cake is awesome!

Looking forward now to continuing with the book, trying more recipes - and soaking up more knowledge of how it all works? While the author is trying to explain which thing does what and why, I think the relationships are still best learned through trial and error. Many delicious trials and many incredibly bad for me errors. Good lord, I need to start exercising again.