Our Favorite Pound Cake
This week, Andy is in Lake Havasu, Arizona, helping prepare his mom for her big move to Los Angeles. So I am handling both the cooking and clean up. Yuck!
Anyway, some fun stuff this week. The cookie is from Sherry Yard's book, the Secrets of Baking. Sherry is the pastry chef at Spago, and I think this is an excellent baking book. This cookie is a variation on her Master Sugar Cookie recipe - I have been planning to make a basic sugar cookie for a while. Well, not this week - I got sidetracked by my desire to have something chocolate, so I went with one of her variations rather than the basic recipe itself. Here, there is a very light addition of chocolate in the form of some melted bittersweet chocolate that is added at the beginning. Now, just as I am typing this, I realize I was supposed to add cocoa powder along with the flour, but, oops, I guess I forgot. So these are not an intense chocolate cookie, they are a lightly chocolated sugar cookie. So this is obviously "adapted from" Sherry Yard, rather than a recipe of hers. Anyway, the result is a very simple cookie. After a few weeks with some elaborations in the cookie department, this is a back to basics cookie.
And, speaking of back to basics, the pound cake is another recipe in that vein. I have been making this recipe for 20 years, and it is my favorite pound cake. For those that don't know, the name of the cake - pound cake - came from the fact that the basic recipe called for a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour. Here, that is basically what is in the cake, although it has a few other ingredients (vanilla, baking powder, and milk). Assuming the farmer's market cooperates tomorrow, my plan is to pick up some strawberries and blueberries and we can have berries and cream on pound cake. It seems a very July 4 kind of dessert to have.
Happy holiday!
D-J
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