Pound for pound...

It's mulch delivery day here at the Remley/Pietrasz Ranch...but before all 9 yards of the hardwood mulch shows up, I thought I'd show you a little something naughty I made this past week. I tell myself it's because of all the yard/garden labor that I'm allowed to indulge in stuff like this! (Hey, whatever I gotta tell myself, right?)

So each month Martha Stewart Living (don't laugh) magazine has a recipe idea (smoothies, sandwiches, etc) and gives you a basic recipe and then does something like 10 variations. This month it was pound cake (YUM!) with lots of variations (again, YUM!). I couldn't resist!!


The mess above shows that I took the basic recipe (eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla) and, knowing how easily distracted I get, I instantly had to morph it into two of the alternate recipes. This meant replacing one of the four sticks of butter with 1/2 cup of sour cream, replacing the vanilla with the seeds from a vanilla bean, and taking about 1/4 of the batter and adding cinnamon to it - this got layered into a cake pan with another 1/4 of the batter to make one of the two loaves cinnamon swirl.

Right, because I couldn't make it easy on myself and just start with the basic recipe. Nooo....

Here's the vanilla bean, getting scraped! I swear the seeds look like mud when they're all gummed up like that.


I feel like the pound cakes could've been a bit more rich in both color and flavor, and I have to wonder if that's partly because we've had to go back to getting eggs from the store. All the local places I've been getting farm eggs from have taken down their signs. I'm wondering if there's TOO much interest in the farm fresh eggs these days, and if maybe even restaurants are buying them up? (Ok, let's be honest, there are no restaurants out here that'd be doing that - I'm sure of that!) So here's the nine PALE eggs from the store.


Here's the pound cakes fresh from the oven. The bottom one is the cinnamon swirl, with a layer of the cinnamon batter on top.


Mmmmm - that's good stuff! I DO have to admit I would like to try adding some brown sugar to this. One variant recipe has you replace all the granulated sugar with brown sugar - that might do the trick!