Big-Time Oops Note:
“Would You Mind Faxing Over That Great Pound Cake Recipe?”
30 November 2018
¶ I hope that you are not someone who has tried to make Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake according to the version of the recipe printed in the otherwise outstanding Guarnaschelli edition of The Joy of Cooking. If you’re not, you’re probably still trying to get your head around all the nomenclature in the previous sentence. But if you are, I’ll bet you were shuddering with horrible memories before it came to an end.
I was almost an unlucky one. But a little voice registered complaint: a pound cake is so called because it combines roughly equal weights of its principal ingredients, eggs, flour, sugar, and butter. The recipe in Joy called for three eggs, a cup and a half of cake flour, and three-quarters of a cup of sugar — so far so good. But “25 tablespoons (about three sticks and one tablespoon) unsalted butter”? That couldn’t be right. And it wasn’t. I lugged Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible from a stack of cookbooks. The correct amount is 13 tablespoons of butter.
I hate to think.
More about this when my silicone kugelhopf mold arrives.