A perfect, plain pound cake is wonderful. A mediocre pound cake is boring.

That’s my conclusion having tried Ina Garten’s recipe for Lemon Cake. This zest-studded cake is first drenched in a puckery lemon syrup, then iced with a crisp sugar glaze. It’s powerfully lemony, in a good way. Thinking back, all my favorite pound cakes have bold flavor additions. Things like candied orange or ginger, rum syrup, brown-butter icing, or chocolate ganache. When I eat plain pound cake, I toast it and eat it with fruit. Or smother it in ice cream. It always needs something extra.

Here is the recipe, if you’d like to try it. Do make sure your ingredients are at the proper temperature- it really makes a difference!

If you are familiar with my old blog, you may recall that the last time the Steelers went to the Super Bowl, seemingly every grocery store in the city ran out of yellow food coloring (as it is the key to Steelerfying your average baked good). Luckily, I found some just in time to make a black & gold marble cake and black & gold rice krispie treats.

Keeping with my Steeler baking tradition, I used most of my yellow food coloring to make frosting for these chocolate cupcakes. While i’ve been tempted to recreate this fabulous Steelers cupcake display, I generally like all my garnishes to be edible (which, in my opinion, fondant is not). I have also been aesthetically impressed by some of Dozen Bakeshop’s tasteful creations, especially this giant rice krispie treat. Flickr also has a number of fabulous Steeler Cakes you can peruse for inspiration.

I’m not a huge cupcake fan, but I enjoyed this recipe from Joanne Chang’s new cookbook. The meringue-based buttercream is fabulous- light, creamy, and just salty enough for my taste. Conveniently, the frosting can keep for a few days at room temperature. I used the leftovers to frost a quick batch of mini vanilla cupcakes, using this recipe from Food & Wine. With all cupcakes, keep an eye on the baking time. Mine were done a good 10 minutes early.
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Two things occurred to me when I made this cake:
1) This is the best pound cake I have ever made
2) I really need to start baking from something other than “The Cake Book.”

In fact, I think I really need to break from my “comfort zone” of baking books and websites (ie davidlebovitz.com and leitesculinaria.com) in order to pursue new inspiration. Every now and then I look to the lesser-perused volumes of my cookbook collection, but i’m starting to realize that several of them are, for lack of a better word, terrible.

I find it hard to admit that I dislike a cookbook. I understand (or at least hope) that a book is the product of someone’s time, labor, and love. Since I am not producing glorious cookbooks for everyone to consume, who am I to shoot them down? That said, plenty of cookbooks are fraught with typos or untested recipes. There are also otherwise great cookbooks with one or two dud recipes. Some people turn to cookbooks for inspiration, but I often look to them for the promise of a product- a recipe that, when executed with care and precision, will yield something I will want to eat and share with others.

I have high hopes for some newer titles i’ve requested through interlibrary loan. I’m hoping to find something unexpectedly brilliant that lifts me out of this rut of familiar authors and cookbooks with the word “best” in the title.

…anyway, this is a really great pound cake! I even preferred it to Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful Rum Soaked Pound Cakes.
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When you make a layer cake, you shouldn’t think about how much of a mess it will make. You shouldn’t think about how many sticks of butter go into it, or how many separate components it requires. You should instead focus on how good it will taste, how impressive it will be, and how many friends it will feed. And, if you’re like me, you can use the amount of time you spend measuring, mixing, and cleaning as justification for the calories.

When I looked to see if other bloggers had tried this recipe, I was surprised to see several negative reactions. It seems that coconut can be either refined or kitschy, depending who you ask. In Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes, Diane Tye lists coconut as one of several “exotic” baking ingredients indicative of mid-century, middle-class status (along with nuts, citrus, pineapple, and dates, to name a few). Coconut appears in a majority of my family’s sweet and savory recipes, so I always regarded it as a staple. Personally, I loved this cake. I thought it was simple, subtle, and elegant.

This cake is relatively time consuming, but you can divide it into stages. It’s a basic white cake brushed with rum syrup, filled with whipped cream-lightened custard, and frosted with coconut buttercream. The cake layers, rum syrup, coconut custard, and buttercream can all be made ahead of time. Properly wrapped, the cake layers and buttercream keep well in the freezer (though you’ll have to re-whip the frosting before you can use it).
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The local DIY group has hosted two local food potlucks. Since there were far more savory than sweet dishes at the first potluck, I decided to make two desserts for the second. Several attendees had the same idea though, which meant this peach buttermilk coffee cake and apple sour cream pie were two of too-many dessert options: oatmeal-chocolate-fig cookies, peach cobbler, fig-blueberry pie with a chocolate nut crust, and some sort of blueberry cake, to name a few.

I usually hate taking home leftovers, but I was more than happy to in this case. I’d say the cake deserves a spot on my unofficial list of best coffee cakes ever. With most coffee cakes:


Few, however, have that perfect blend of balanced components and great execution. If I’m going to eat a cake that in all likelihood has a pound of butter in it, I want crunchy streusel, a crackly-creamy-sugary glaze, an interesting filling, and a well-browned exterior. As you can see, this cake fits the bill:


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After repeatedly ripping bundt cakes during unmolding, I finally gave in and bought a heavy, nonstick cast-aluminum pan. I’ve made six cakes since then, and all of them have effortlessly slid out of the pan, perfectly browned. It’s a case of my mom and aunt’s culinary advice (“right tool, right job”) hitting home.

I’ll take bundt cakes and coffee cakes over cupcakes any day. I find them homey, unfussy, and satisfying, especially if they’re topped with streusel or a crackly glaze.

For recipes, I usually go to The Simple Art of Perfect Baking, The Cake Book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More, or Baking From my Home to Yours. There are, however, plenty of other great classic and new titles you could use. I’ll usually take a notebook to the library or bookstore and jot down any recipes that really stand out. It’s a good practice- it’s how I found the fabulous Sweet Potato Bundt in the Sweet Melissa Baking Book.
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