the evil pound cake

On Saturday, while waiting to pick FH up at the airport, I decided to make a lemon cream cheese pound cake. I saw a special on PBS with Martha Stewart and she made 3 different pound cakes in 10 minutes. Seemed easy.

I made the mistake of not reading the whole recipe before starting. It did seem like a lot of ingredients for something that had to fit into a bread tin, but I've never made a cake before so I just went with it. Then I realized, once I had everything ready to mix, that the recipe made 9 cups of batter and the pound cake only required 5 cups. I said "fuck the math" and decided to just split the 9 cups between two pound cakes. That might be what caused part of the problem...

wine was not one of the "official" ingredients

Note, I used a butter made of yogurt to grease the bread tins. The flour didn't stick to it very well. I should have used real butter. That might have also added to the disaster unfolding.

I couldn't get the tops smooth like Martha did. The top looked like it had some kind of skin disease.

 It said to cook the cake for 65 minutes or until a toothpick came out clean. This resulted in overcooking (later found out I was supposed to reduce certain ingredients and add other ingredients for cooking at altitude).

When I finally pulled the pound cakes out they looked great. For about 2 seconds. Then the top of the cakes suddenly sunk like the fucking Titanic.

They have a very distinctive V shaped top. Like V for "victory" or V like that show about aliens. The cake on the left sank dramatically, the one on the right took a few more seconds.

One of the contributing factors to the cake sinking might have been the temperature of the house. The battery had died in FH's thermostat and it was only 62 degrees inside the house.

Surprisingly, especially since the middle of the cake was undercooked (FH called it "moist", but really it was undercooked) and based on its weight (FH said he was surprised to find it weighed more than a brick of gold) it tasted pretty good. FH brought one of the cakes into work, where I assumed it would be thrown out after a reasonable amount of time had passed. But I got an email from one of his employees saying that the cake was "so good it's evil". Special thanks to WL who brought me vanilla extract from Mexico!

FH said maybe don't ever make a pound cake again...

BTW, Jake got his new eyes installed by FH on Sunday. Hooray!

I make a crappy cake for him and he fixes my car - no one said partnerships were equal