Honey Vanilla Pound Cake

  • By Katie Roche
  • 31 Jan, 2020
If, by chance, you own this cookbook and have followed along with this voyage, you'll notice that I've skipped a couple of recipes in the dessert chapter. Don't worry - I'm coming back to them. It's just that the two I skipped each contain an ingredient that I'm having an immense amount of trouble finding. I would get into it here and now, because I'm very frustrated, but alas - that's an ItemQuest rant for another day. Today, the only thing required in my ItemQuest was a new honey bear which, when I want to BI-LO, was conveniently and randomly on display in the produce section right at the front of the store. I didn't have to go into the bowels of the aisles to search whether it would be with the baking stuff, with the tea, etc. Looking at the picture as I type right now caused me to wonder why honey comes in bear-shaped bottles. The internet didn't really give a clear or concise answer on this (it's mostly speculation) but now that I think about this, if I ever saw honey in any other type of packaging I would be extremely confused and off-put. Does anyone else have strong feelings about the way things are packaged? Or is that just me? The one other instance in my life when I've found the packaging of something extremely off-putting was when I was visiting my grandparents' town in Alabama and their grocery store was selling banana pudding in BLADDERS. I mean there's no RIGHT way to sell banana pudding because it's disgusting and shouldn't be a thing, but I know for SURE that selling it in bladders is the WRONG way. Isn't this also how Canada sells their milk? Like imagine buying a BAG of MILK. I'm just having visions of Duggar-sized families needing to buy milk at Costco and the bags of milk there being the size of a waterbed. I've steered extremely off-topic. We're making pound cake.
I did not take a picture of the first step, which was to cream the butter and sugar, but I'll have you know that Ina's introduction to this recipe specifies that *cool* room temperature butter here is necessary and makes all the difference in the texture of the cake. She says one hour on the counter will give you cool room temperature butter. Whose counter though? Because if I made this at my grandfather's house, one hour on the counter would give me melted butter. One hour on the counter at our house and it's hardly softened at all, shoutout to aggressive AC. (For best results of me, in my life, I like to remain at Fairly Cold Room Temperature.) But whatever, one hour. She says in her intro that she got this idea from Cook's Illustrated which she has the gall to refer to as "not very fancy". That honestly astounded me, Cook's Illustrated is VERY fancy, in the sense that it's strictly for people who actually want information about how to cook a thing and not just to look at pictures of it and then tag their friends on Facebook and be like, "We're SO MAKING THIS." Those people so aren't making whatever that is. People who read Cook's Illustrated are. Go to their houses.

So while the butter and sugar creamed, I put eggs, vanilla, honey, and lemon zest "in a glass measuring cup" as Ina instructed, and did not mix them - also her instructions. Then I poured one egg at a time into the mixing bowl.  I also stopped to manually stir the mixture a ton of times because my KitchenAid, though handy, is obnoxious and does not stir all the way to the bottom of its bowl. I think Dan knows how to fix this and is pretending he doesn't, and I guess that's ok since he met his quota of QT with the KitchenAid for the next couple of years when he had to replace all the gears that broke when I tried to make brioche pretzels in it. They weren't even worth the trouble, and turned out terribly. We all need a good kitchen fail once in a while to keep us humble. 
Behold - the sifter. She says to sift, so I do, and I do love to sift. Some people think it's a waste of time. Those people are not the Cook's Illustrated target audience. Those people share TASTY videos on Facebook every day and never get around to making them. (Full disclosure, I've made something from a TASTY video. It was just ok.) 
My apologies if this ruins the illusion of me being surprised by the outcome of every recipe, but I've made this several times before and already knew how it was going to go. I knew it wasn't going to bake properly. I was correct..
I mean look at this. It isn't a failure per se, but the edges are *well done* (burnt?) and a toothpick was still not coming out from the middle clean at this point but like, I had other stuff to do today and did not have the time or patience to sit through a quick-bread not baking properly for even longer than I'd already given it. I tried covering it in foil for part of the baking time and everything. My strong suspicion is that the baking isn't going well because I'm using a glass loaf pan instead of a metal one. I'd have to test this theory, obviously, but Ina's photo shows it in a metal tin and my friend Hunter who is a butcher but knows a lot about food says that a lady he knows has baked the same loaf recipe in multiple types of loaf pans and it has turned out differently in each one. This is a huge recipe-writing oversight, in my opinion. As a professional, Ina HAS TO know that different types of loaf pans will result in different quality levels, and yet she doesn't specify which type of loaf pan will yield the best results. But, thank God, she DOES have the courtesy to let us know the exact duration of time to leave our butter on the counter at whatever "room temperature" means in each of our homes. In case you cannot tell, I find this extremely annoying. 
Tragedy struck my household when I went to have a slice of this with my afternoon coffee: my coffee grinder broke. Obviously I called Dan in a panic, and he tried to console me over the deafening noise of F-16s taking off in the background because he was at work. For the surest proof that he is The One, he told me to go buy a new one rather than leading with "I'll fix it when I get home" because at this point in our marriage, he knows that telling me to go 12 hours without a functioning coffee grinder is, like, Not a Good Idea. (If anyone reading this is thinking "Ugh, people are so dramatic about their coffee", I see you calling your sports team "we" or making an Instagram account just for your car/dog/whatever, so do not @ me. Coffee is my One Dramatic Thing and I know you have yours.) Anyway, I had already had a cup today and didn't feel like going to Starbs so I actually ATE THIS WITH TEA (Summit Spice Orange Spice tea, to be specific) and it was an adequate substitute, I guess. Felt very British actually, to be eating such a gently-flavored slice of afternoon cake with a cup of tea. If Dan can't fix my coffee grinder when he gets home, though, we're starting tomorrow getting coffee out and immediately following that up with a trip to wherever around here I can buy a decent burr grinder. Actually, say a prayer on that. I do not have high hopes of locating a quality coffee grinder in the land where a lady once asked me if the Starbucks smoked butterscotch latte tasted like meat. 

Regarding the actual cake: it's SO GOOD flavor-wise, just need to solve the burned-outside-raw-in-middle thing, which as I said, I suspect can be solved with a metal loaf pan. My friend Tina who tasted this for me said she actually enjoyed the crispy edges but felt that the inside was quite dense. The flavor, she agreed, is top notch. The lemon zest gives it a good little kiss of citrus but the flavor is not at ALL lemon-forward, so if you're not a lemon person, don't worry, it's honestly not lemony. If you ARE a lemon person, this would be INCREDIBLE with Ina's homemade lemon curd spread on top. The best thing about this cake is that it truly is basic and it serves as a great template for whatever else you might dream up. It'd be good with strawberries and whipped cream on top. It'd be good with butter. It's good plain. It'd be good broken up in a trifle. You really can't go wrong with it other than, apparently, trying to bake it in a glass pan. So other than neglecting to give, *ahem*, a most BASIC helpful instruction to ensure success, this cake is truly basic, awesome, and definitely something you should make. Especially recommend to novice and/or lazy bakers, as it's extremely, EXTREMELY easy. Happy baking!
By Katie Roche September 21, 2020
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
By Katie Roche September 1, 2020
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
By Katie Roche August 18, 2020
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.

#1: Butternut Squash Soup
By Katie Roche August 4, 2020
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all.  "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.

So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
By Katie Roche July 8, 2020
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics. 

We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
By Katie Roche June 27, 2020
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting. 
By Katie Roche June 19, 2020
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes. 
By Katie Roche June 12, 2020
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
By Katie Roche June 5, 2020
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup  to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.

So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
By Katie Roche May 28, 2020
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go! 

ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand! 
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