All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [15]
This cake can be sliced thinly, so plan on serving between 16 and 32 people-depending (of course) on how you slice it.
Missy G’s Sweet Potato Pound Cake
A Lesson In Re-Caking
Re-cake vb: to bake a cake a second, third, or fourth time in an attempt to troubleshoot or finesse a flawed or bland recipe.
I hate flawed recipes. I’m in the news business. I embrace clarity. I embrace veracity. I eschew sloppiness. Badly written or incomplete recipes make me nuts. Ingredients cost money. Firing up the oven costs money. Baking and cooking take up precious weekend time. I hate wasting time. I hate wasting ingredients, energy, and money. Ergo, when I find myself struggling with a bad recipe, I get perturbed. Annoyed. A wee bit vexed.
If it’s an interesting concept, the recipe, I then launch into CSI: Kitchen and try to figure out what makes a good cake go bad.
That’s what happened with this sweet potato pound cake recipe. See, my father is the sweet potato king of Gloucester County, Virginia. He is a man obsessed. He has sweet potatoitis, which is incurable. He’s been known to plant as many as four 600-foot-long rows of sweet potatoes. Each row has about 200 hills of sweet potatoes. There are about 10 to 20 tubers per hill. Do the math. (Hint: it’s a lot of sweet potatoes.)
And he’s overly generous. I hardly cook, but he usually thrusts two bags of sweet potatoes at me, which I then have to find a place for under the sink, which I soon forget about. And then, when I do remember, half of them have shriveled and sprouted, which just makes me mad because I told him not to give me two bags.
All those Golden Nuggets. All those Beauregards. Gone to spud.
So, I needed baking recipes for sweet potatoes. I have a great sweet potato biscuit recipe. I also have two really good sweet potato soufflé recipes. But I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a sweet potato pound cake recipe?
I found one, and it fell. Three times. Fell despite my attempts to keep it from falling. Three times. I baked it longer, but it was still too moist—it had a steamed pudding texture, rather than a cakeish one. I added ½ cup of flour, but that made it taste more like sweet potato bread. And it was bland. To punch it up, I added some flavors from my sweet potato soufflé recipes: I added ½ cup of diced Granny Smith apples, I added ground cinnamon and maple flavoring, and finally, I sprinkled the batter in the pan with a pecan and brown sugar topping. Lord, it was delicious, but the infernal thing fell again.
When in doubt, call Momma. Momma said, “Did the recipe tell you HOW to cook your mashed sweet potatoes?”
“Um, it said ‘mashed cooked sweet potatoes’”, I answered.
“I assume you boiled them”, she said.
No one knows you like your mother. “I did.”
“Don’t boil”, she instructed. “Bake. Just put them in a shallow pan and bake until they’re done. That’ll get rid of excess moisture, and it will intensify the flavor. That’s what they tell you to do with sweet potato pies. Try it.”
Not only was Momma right (Momma’s always right), but her tip, plus my previous changes to the recipe, produced one scrumptious cake. The ATC staff snarfed the whole thing up, licked the crumbs off their plates, rubbed their bellies, and insisted this was my “best cake ever”, “definitely in your top ten of cakes”, and they begged, “Can I have the recipe?”
Sure. Here it is. It should serve 20 to 32.
* * *
YOU’LL NEED
A shallow baking pan
A potato masher
A 10-inch tube pan
FOR THE CAKE
About 4 medium sweet potatoes
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
4 large eggs
3½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking