reason for the season

I have a bad habit of finding recipes for things, adapting them to fit my purposes on the fly, then never documenting what I did. Sometimes, the results are uniquely delicious and amazing, and often, I never manage to recreate the recipe again.

So here’s the first in what will be an occasional feature here: documentation of a recipe I tweaked and futzed with to make something tasty.

When asked what I was bringing for Easter, I told my brother that, in light of recent events, I wanted to celebrate the reason for the season — this season, that’s been Afroman, of course. His court victory over the police who tried to sue him for epically trolling them (after they raided his house, terrified his family, and stole some money) has been a rare positive in borderline-dystopian America.

One of the more popular songs he released was called Lemon Pound Cake, so, of course, that was the option.

It was actually kind of more of a lemon bundt cake, but here’s the recipe (with brief notes).

Step 1:

Grease up your bundt pan — I used cooking spray then a generous flouring.

Step 2:

Assemble:

With your stand mixer, cream

1 cup butter with

2 cups granulated sugar. After everything’s light and fluffy, add in

zest from 3+ lemons – I’d aim for something close to a 1/4 cup here – there’s no such thing as too much. Once that’s mixed in well (save the lemons), add

4 eggs, one at a time. Make sure each is well incorporated and scrape the sides and bottom to make sure everything is mixing. I also added in

1 scraped-out vanilla bean at this point. The original recipe said to use 1 tsp extract, but I just had the beans on hand. Once that’s all nice and combined, it’s time to get a dry bowl and a wet bowl.

THE DRY BOWL
2 and 3/4 cups AP flour
3 Tablespoons corn starch
2 Teaspoons baking powder

THE WET BOWL
1/2 Cup buttermilk
1/4 Cup sour cream
1/4 Cup lemon juice (which is going to require juicing at least two of those lemons)

Now, what you want to do is mix both up really well then alternate between adding them to the mixer. Go 1/3 of the dry bowl then 1/2 of the wet bowl. Mix it all up a ton, scrape around, etc… do another dry addition, the rest of the wet, then the rest of the dry. Make sure everything is well combined after each addition.

Then you just pour it into your bundt and bake at 350. Mine took an hour, but my oven is bad. I’d suggest checking after 45 and going from there.

PRO AMATEUR TIP: use a probe thermometer – I undercooked a lot of baked things until I started doing this. Breads and lighter things should be ~200 degrees inside, and dense things (like this pound cake) closer to 210.

Let cool for an hour or two and then remove from the pan (avoid swearing or ruining it).

Combine about 1.5 Cups powdered sugar with
MORE lemon zest (maybe 1 teaspoon) and
about 2 Teaspoons of lemon juice

mix this up and drizzle it all over. I let the glaze set a little and then did more passes, but it never really looked like I wanted — I might suggest using a Teaspoon of milk or cream here and upping the sugar as needed to get a thick glaze that doesn’t disappear into the cake… but despite the glaze not looking great, it was celebrated at the Easter meal as righteously as Afroman’s court victory (and jesus, if that’s your thing).

I served it with macerated strawberries and some whipped cream.