"pound cake" news and stories

There was a time, when I was between the ages of 9 and 12, when I ate an entire Sara Lee Butter Pound Cake every week. In one night, by the way, with either ice cold milk or ice cold Pepsi (yeah, I like the combo). So I can understand The King's love of pound cake.

Gourmet has the recipe for Elvis Presley's Favorite Pound Cake. They call it "the best pound cake we've ever tasted," and it does sound quite good. It's not the healthiest dessert/snack, but we're talking about Elvis Presley here, not Jack LaLanne.

The original pound cake got its name from the fact that it contained a pound of each of its basic ingredients: butter, sugar, flour and eggs. The average pound cake these days tends to be a bit more refined, using some sort of leavening agent in addition to eggs and often incorporating additional ingredients, such as vanilla, sour cream, heavy cream or even chocolate.

Pound cake, needless to say, is not a low fat food. It is dense, tender, buttery and something that is best eaten in small portions if you are watching what you eat. Of course, pound cake tastes so good that it can be hard to stop with just one slice. This recipe produces a lightened pound cake that is almost entirely fat free, so you don't have to stop with a mere sliver.

Meyer lemons are a slightly sweeter version of regular lemons and are becoming more and more popular with bakers as they become easier to find in stores. The distinguishing feature of the lemons, aside from their small size and thin skin, is that they have none of the bitterness that is found in regular lemons. This means that anything they are used in, from lemonade to lemon tarts, will have a very intense lemon flavor that is not cut by an overly tart aftertaste of any kind. Jen, the Barmy Baker, took advantage of their fantastic flavor and baked up these Meyer Lemon Loaves using a recipe from Pierre Hermes' Desserts and some lemons from her small Meyer lemon tree. The loaves are only a tiny bit lighter than a pound cake and are rich with butter and sour cream. They are also spiked with a little bit of rum, which makes them seem a little bit more festive for the holidays.

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An ice cream sandwich is a great summer treat. Not only is it cool and tasty, but it has a little bit of nostalgia attached to it because you probably ate them as a kid, with the ice cream squishing out from between the cookies and making a mess of things. Somehow, that seemed to make it taste even better at the time.

Substituting pound cake for the cookies usually found on ice cream sandwiches is a great way to reinvent the classic dessert into something a little bit more elegant for summer entertaining. Just thinly slice up a store-bought (or homemade) pound cake and spread some softened ice cream between two slices. Wrap each serving up with plastic wrap and, when you're ready to serve, just place one on each plate and garnish with whipped cream and berries.

There is no reason that you have to use these sandwiches when entertaining, of course. You can simply stock them in your freezer and have them yourself when the mood strikes you.

You could be like Santos of Scent of Green Bananas, and well, go bananas.

Santos, who blogs regularly from Guam, is on a little holiday, and when she is in LA, she blogs from her LA-based blog, Meet Me at the Corner of Third and Fairfax. Apparently, Santos fell into a lemony thicket, and has crates and crates of lemons. The products of her first crate of lemons are a luscious lemon curd which would be a serious overdose if spread on the Basil-Lemon Peel Sugar-crusted French Lemon Pound Cake. Overdose of lemons? Who am I kidding. Bring it on!