Lemon pound cake.

You may not know this, but a well-made pound cake is a beautiful, tasty, delightful thing. God bless whoever came up with the idea of putting a pound apiece of butter, sugar, flour and eggs (in that order, I understand) together and making a simple cake creation out of it.

Pound cake is nearly a religious symbol in the South. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has a different recipe. You’d think a pound cake recipe wouldn’t have nearly so many variations, but everybody’s grandmama or grandaddy or Aunt Bessie or Cousin Alma or Aunt Ellie who’s not really your aunt but she might as well be family… everybody’s got a recipe. Some call for shortening, some call for butter. Some call for vanilla, some for lemon. Some call for chocolate chips or blueberries or peaches. Some are reportedly best baked in loaf pans, while others are better in a tube pan, and still others only work in a 10-inch bundt. (There are folks who would faint if you baked their beloved family recipe in a bundt. I don’t really know why.) Some recipes turn out a fluffy, pale interior with a barely golden puckered crust, while other recipes produce a dense yellow beauty complete with a toothsome outer dark brown crumb. It all depends on your fat, and your means of mixing, and the time spent mixing wet vs. dry and dry into wet…

Such a simple recipe doesn’t seem so simple, does it?

Hershey’s Chocolate Cake, by request.

I’ve only made this cake twice – once to try it out, which was a huge success, and the second time for Cullen’s 25th birthday, on request. It was actually quite an honor to be asked to make the cake for his birthday. Normally his aunt makes all birthday cakes for the family, but in this case (and under family circumstances), not so much. He got a piece of the first cake and was smitten from the word “go.” When we asked him what he wanted for his birthday cake, he immediately answered: “That chocolate cake you made and took to the office. It was goooood.”

How can you turn down a man with a wish for his birthday cake?

The only difference between the two was the buttercream that I used. I used a recipe for “drier” buttercream the first go-round – that’s the cake that I’ve been teasing you with for weeks on end. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t remember where I found that particular recipe, so I had to go searching for another one. I finally settled on the SMBC from Joy the Baker, and though it was tasty, I think I screwed it up. It was very soft, and like to never set up properly. Of course, it may have been divine retribution from the Kitchen Gods for using someone else’s Cuisinart mixer versus my own loving KitchenAid to make the damn buttercream in the first place. I’m sure that’s a cardinal sin, written down in the original kitchen Bible. That’ll teach me, won’t it? Maybe next time, it’ll work out for me.