Teleidoscope

Sat, Aug 11, 2007

Pound Cake

Posted at 8:56 pm MDT to Technology

Baking cakes from scratch was not a skill that I learned from my Mother. She always used cake mixes. Sometimes they were modified in various ways -- I remember making lemon cakes with packages of lemon pudding added, before they became so popular that Duncan Hines started producing lemon cake mixes with the pudding already included.

The cake pans my mother used for making layer cakes were unlike any I have ever seen for sale (I suspect she received them as a wedding present). Each pan had a rivet in the center of the bottom, to which was attached a flat, narrow strip of metal that went to the side of the pan, up the side, and ended in a sort of tab. When you were ready to take the cake out of the pan, you pushed the tab all the way around the pan, and the metal strip sliced the cake away from the sides and bottom of the pan. We always greased the pans with shortening (moving the tab to make sure we greased the area under the blade) but the greasing wasn't really functional, and I don't think I learned to do it properly. I have a long history of baked goods breaking when I try to get them out of the pan.

I am not really fond of most kinds of cake. I don't like frosting. When I eat a piece of frosted birthday cake, I generally leave behind a frosting skeleton: squishy frosting that won't hold its shape is disappointing. Mom used to make a frosted cake for my youngest brother, whose birthday is two days away from mine and on a holiday, so we always ended up having family picnics as combined celebrations. For me she made an angelfood cake with a thin whipped cream coating, meant to be eaten with strawberries (my birthday was prime strawberry season).

I love fruitcake (and fruitcake fruit: I stockpile it and eat it raw as a snack. I love strong citrus flavors) and I like poundcake. But in general, given a choice between a rich, frosted cake and a chunk of good artisanal bread, I'll choose the bread. That's part of why I've been baking bread every week or two for years, and haven't baked a cake in ages.

Before I moved to Colorado, I occasionally baked cakes from mixes, but after I moved here, I found that cake mixes designed for sealevel don't really work well, even if you make the recommended altitude adjustments. And they stick in the pans even worse than they do at sealevel.

Food Network recently had a Cake Week: most of the episodes of the various shows were cake related. I found myself in the mood to bake a cake as a technical project.

Yesterday I baked the first cake I have made in probably 15 years, and, I believe, the first one I have ever baked from scratch in my life.

I used the Pound Cake recipe from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking and I think it came out fairly well. It's not too sweet, or too oily the way some store-bought poundcakes are. I gave some of the cake to some of my friends at the Farmers' Market today and they said it was good, which is encouraging.

I also made a batch of Alton's Pan Lube -- a cup and a half of allpurpose flour thoroughly beaten into two cups of shortening -- and used some to to grease the pan, which seemed to work well.

Alton being a southern boy, there is buttermilk in a lot of his recipes, including this one. I may try buttermilk biscuits tomorrow, to use up some more of the quart. Biscuits are neither New England/Canuck nor Italian, so when I was growing up they were usually "Poppin' Fresh" when they appeared at all. I actually learned to like biscuits at a restaurant chain where biscuits and honey were one of the bread options, and I tried them because biscuits were exotic. I have made biscuits occasionally over the years, but I generally lean toward yeast instead of chemical leaveners for breadish baked goods: the last time few times I made biscuits (this is talking about a timespan of ten or fifteen years) they were sourdough biscuits, not southern-style.

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