Sunday, December 22, 2013

Almond Pound Cake

In our small circle, my wife and I are the Lennon & McCartney of almond pound cakes, that is, we both bake them, we both share them with mutual and different acquaintances, and we kind of share the credit, sometimes taking it if the other has baked it (throughout their career as Beatles, John and Paul agreed under contract to share the credit of each of their songs, no matter how involved the other might have been in its composition; that is why we see both their names associated with the almost exclusively Paul "Yesterday" and the almost exclusively John "A Day in the Life"). We bake a lot of almond pound cakes. One Christmas season not so long ago, we baked almost thirty within a one-week range of time. We began giving them to people as a show of good feeling, and, as we have grown to know more people, the list expands. There have been a couple of years where we have fallen off production, such as the 2012 let's-make-sure-Alan-doesn't-relapse-into-the-Thanksgiving-pneumonia period, but the production has been fairly consistent over time.

We use a recipe that we found in the Southern Living Annual 1990 Cookbook, with some variations. I am happy to share the recipe, by the way, but I would prefer not to post it here and incur the wrath of Time-Warner Communications. Let's just say that it is a rich recipe, calling for five eggs, three cups of sugar, and some obvious, tasty ingredients such as vanilla and almond extracts. In fact, the recipe in the book is for a lemon pound cake, and we adapted it in a successful attempt to replicate a recipe that my mother "followed" when I was a boy. I say "followed" because there lies the difference in how BetterHalf and I approach baking these cakes. When I say that she does not care to watch me do it, I think that I relate the root of the difference.

BetterHalf approaches baking these cakes as a romantic scientist, and I approach baking them as a pragmatic artist. I understand that it looks as if I have my modifiers wrong, but she loves the idea of the recipe. I don't mean to suggest that she is hidebound by it, but she likes to follow it. She likes the process--I don't blame the cooking shows on television for all of this tendency, but when she decides to try a recipe, every ingredient gets measured and placed in its own dish, she follows the order of procedure in the recipe, and that first attempt's success weighs on her careful execution of those descriptions. It's as if she is attempting to replicate a lab experiment, which she is, in a way, and she will tinker with the experiment in subsequent attempts. That first time, though, measures her success in how well she can do what the book says.

I, on the other hand, want the cake, and I tend to cut corners a bit, because I am also one who is concerned about cleaning up while preparing the recipe. So, for example, rather than put the milk, the almond extract, and the vanilla abstract in separate containers, to add them all later, I just put all the liquid ingredients in one measuring cup. Rather than soften butter, I melt it to speed mixing later, and I melt it in the same vessel I will blend in. I see myself as cutting time and work in order to concentrate on getting a tasty cake out of the effort. Did I put in too much vanilla? A drop won't make a difference, and, if I miscounted the eggs and put in an extra one, so be it. That kind of approach drives BetterHalf nuts.

But the cakes always turn out tasty, and I look forward to my diet cheat days when I can eat more than just the slightest taste. However, I imagine that now some cake recipients will want to know who actually put which cake together. Look and see how the almonds are arranged on the top. I discovered a couple of years ago that if I missed a spot in preparing the pan, I could put an almond over the missed spot to help prevent sticking. The side effect was the delicious taste of a roasted almond in a random slice of cake. If you see a cake with almonds clustered at random, that's probably one I put together. BetterHalf will have hers evenly spaced, all the way around.