A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [214]
3 cups unsifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (2 sticks) butter (see Tip above)
½ cup vegetable shortening
3 cups sugar
6 extra-large eggs
¾ cup milk
2 teaspoons lemon extract
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1. Butter and flour a 10-inch tube pan, tapping out the excess flour, and set aside. Sift the flour and baking powder together onto a large piece of wax paper and set aside also.
2. Cream the butter, shortening, and sugar in a large electric mixer bowl at low speed for 3 minutes, scraping the bowl at half-time, then raise the mixer speed to medium and cream 2 to 3 minutes longer or until light and fluffy.
3. With the mixer at low speed, add the eggs one by one, beating well and scraping the bowl after each addition. With the mixer still at low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry—four additions of the dry and three of the milk are about right. Scrape the bowl well, then beat in the lemon and vanilla extracts.
4. Scoop the batter into the prepared pan, spreading to the edge, then rap the pan several times on the counter to level the batter and release large air bubbles.
5. Place the cake in the lower third of the oven, set the thermostat at 350° F., turn the oven on, and bake the cake for 1 hour and 10 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes or until it begins to pull from the sides of the pan, is springy to the touch, and a cake tester inserted halfway between the rim and the central tube comes out clean.
6. Cool the cake in the upright pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Using a small thin-blade spatula, loosen the cake carefully around the edge and around the central tube. Invert the cake on a wire rack and cool to room temperature before cutting. Delicious as is or with sliced sweetened-to-taste fresh strawberries or peaches ladled on top.
BROWN SUGAR POUND CAKE WITH WILD HICKORY NUTS
MAKES A 10-INCH TUBE CAKE
When I was about ten, I rescued a robin hatch-ling that had fallen from its nest and raised that bird to maturity. Mitzy spent the night in the tall hickory tree just outside my bedroom window and each morning would peck at my screen until I came down to greet her. In the fall, when hickory nuts rained down upon the ground, my brother and I would gather them for Mother while Mitzy perched on a branch above. Hickory nuts, our father told us, were related to pecans (he knew such things because he was a botanist). They did indeed taste like pecans although they seemed—I’m searching for the right word here—“smokier.” There all similarity ends, however, because hickory nuts are hard-shelled and their meat exceedingly tedious to extract. Mother baked hickory nuts into cookies and stirred them into fudge. But she never baked this cake because I didn’t obtain the recipe until after she had died. It is an old North Carolina favorite and I must say that it is heaven. Note: Choose a good all-purpose flour for this recipe, not cake or “light” flour; neither has enough gluten to support the heavy batter. Also use a light-colored pan for baking this cake; the batter is so rich that a dark pan or one lined with a dark nonstick coating will cause the cake to overbrown.
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1¼ cups (2½ sticks) butter, slightly softened
1 pound light brown sugar
5 large eggs
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup moderately finely chopped hickory nuts, black walnuts, or pecans
1. Preheat the oven to 325° F. Butter and flour a 10-inch tube pan well, then tap out the excess flour. Set the pan aside.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together onto a piece of wax paper and set aside.
3. Cream the butter in a large electric mixer bowl at moderate