January 6, 2025: Four Hundred Pound Cakes and Counting

Finally, the holidays are over. Sorry to be a Scrooge, but they felt brutal this year.

Part of the reason is that instead of having something made for Kendall’s customers this year, he asked me if I’d make mini sourdough loaves. I said no to the sourdough, but suggested I could make some kind of quick bread.

We wanted something Chrstmasy so I scoured my cookbooks and Pinterest and decided gingerbread was a good Christmas option because by December, I think we’re all a little tired of pumpkin spice. I chose three recipes and only had to test two of them before landing on the one I liked. It was soft, moist, spicy,and delicious and just what we had in mind.

When we got back from spending Thanksgiving with my family in Texas, I headed to Costco for my bi-weekly therapy session and also to get ingredients. Well, they didn’t have molasses and they didn’t have cloves so I headed down the road to Sam’s, which totally negated any therapy I got from Costco. 

To get to Sam’s you have to make a left hand turn on an extremely busy road, and I hate left hand turns. Once inside it’s dark and full of junk, and everything except for the person checking your card at the door is automated. It feels depressing and dystopian. Give me my bougie, well-lit Costco which still has people helping you out,  please and thank you.

Anyways, Sam’s didn’t have molasses or cloves either. I stood in an asle contemplating what to do.Thankfully, just like Kendall had a couple of backup girls in mind when we were dating in college in case we didn’t work out, I had a backup plan in mind in case our gingerbread didn’t work out. Enter, Mom’s pound cake.

I’d already bought butter, sugar, and eggs at Costco, but since that’s essentially all pound cake is, I loaded up my cart with more, taking a wild guess at how much I’d need since I didn’t know how many mini loaves each recipe would make.

Once I got home, I worked out by carrying everything up to our third floor apartment. And since we have a small fridge and no way to store that much butter or eggs, I started baking immediately, and didn’t stop except to sleep for the next three days.

For four days, I baked and Kendall bagged and labeled. By the time we finished, there were pound cake crumbs everywhere and the smell was seeping from our pores and every surface of the apartment. Once we finished I gave the apartment a deep clean and then collapsed with the same cold Kendall had picked up over Thanksgiving.

He went out to deliver them and I collapsed on the couch 

My phone buzzed.

“I have bad news.” he said.

“How many more do you need?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred?”

“Oh my gosh are you kidding me???” 

I can’t remember if I said this out loud or just thought it or hung up on him or what. I was sick and tired and everything was running together at this point, but of course I agreed. I mean, what option did we have at this point? Apparently these guys talk between shops and knew we were passing out homemade poundcakes so it’s not like we could go grab something from the store and make it look cute and pass it out. 

So I went and grabbed more ingredients and cranked out a hundred more. If you count the broken ones, I baked a total of 410 pound cakes in our tiny, one-bedroom apartment. I bet none of those back up girls Kendall had in mind in college would have agreed to do that. He got lucky, that’s for sure.

Anyways, after that little adventure, it was time to Christmas shop and prep food and pack to go spend Christmas with his family in Virginia.

It was a holiday season we’ll always remember and hopefully never repeat. We were so ready to get back to work so we could rest, and if you’ve ever run your own business, you know that’s saying something.

And on a final note, can I just say that in my opinion Gingerbread shouldn’t even be called Gingerbread. Molasses is clearly the star ingredient. Ginger plays as minor a role as the cloves I couldn’t find. 

Now that that’s off my chest, here’s my mom’s pound cake recipe as she gave it to me. It’s dense and delicious and I still love it, even after making over 400 of them.

Mom’s Pound Cake

Preheat oven to 375. Grease and flour a tube pan

Cream in mixer:

• 2 cups sugar

• 2 sticks softened butter

Add:

• 2 tsp ( but I use 2 tblsp) vanilla. (I also add almond flavoring —really yum)

• 1/2 tsp salt

Add to creamed mixture:

• 1/2 dz eggs. (I use eight eggs because it makes it richer and just because we usually have the eggs ) Beat eggs together.

This is important:

• Alternate putting in the mixed eggs and

• 2 cups flour to the creamed mixture.

• Don’t over mix.

Bake till done. The top should be crunchy (it’s the best part—be careful not to eat it all before you cut into the cake. :)

Usually 45-60 minutes. Use knife test.

Honey Lavender Ice Cream

I was gonna write a creative post to tell you just how wonderful this honey lavender ice cream is, but I’m not gonna do that. After all, is there anything worse than scrolling through miles of text to get to a recipe? I think not. 

All I’m gonna tell you is that the first time I tried it, it felt like God himself had come down and touched my tongue. It’s that good. At least I think so. 

Nope. I think the best thing to do is to let you try it and experience the ecstasy of this delirious delectation for yourself. Afterwards, come back and tell me what you think. I want to know, did we just discover nectar from Heaven?

InGREDIENTS

3 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

½ cup honey

5 egg yolks

1 T lavender

pinch of salt

Instructions

• Combine milk, cream, honey, salt, and lavender in a medium saucepan. Stirring occasionally until honey is dissolved and the mixture is hot. Remove from heat and allow lavender to steep in the mixture for 30 minutes or until desired lavender flavor has developed.

• Strain lavender from the mixture and return the mixture to the pot.

• Whisk egg yolks separately in a small bowl. Still whisking, slowly pour the eggs to combine with the mixture in the saucepan

• Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, around 10 minutes or until mixture thickens and coats a spoon. Be sure not to let the mixture boil to avoid curdling.

• Allow mixture to cool before placing in ice cream maker.

• Pour the custard into the ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Once ice cream is churned, pour into a freezer safe container and freeze for a minimum of four hours.

p.s. You need these cute containers. The liss are nice and bendy which makes them easy to take on and off and they don’t crack when frozen.

p.s.s. This is the ice cream maker have and love

p.s.s.s. lavender and salt

Showtime at the Cabin

If we’d been driving up the highway at Fancy Gap we’d have seen the fog cloaking the mountains. But this morning we were in the mountains. We were in the fog. 

Kendall found a couple of old camping chairs in the cabin closet and placed them like movie seats in the middle of the long back yard. We poured some black coffee into our mismatched mugs and took our seats.

There’s no television at the cabin. You don’t need one. It would be a sin. Nature is the show. Nature is all you need. Well, nature and a good cup of coffee.

On each side of the perfectly rectangular yard, the woods form walls. At the end where our chairs faced, a small hill conceals a small pond. Beyond the pond, another wall of woods. The lush, green grass looks and feels like velvet. It’s like being in your own private theater, 

We watched as a sheet of fog rose from behind the hill and stretched itself as tall as the trees. It hovered for a moment as if it had reached the ceiling and then, in one smooth movement, bent forward and floated towards us.

It spread itself across the width and length of the yard. We watched in silence as it drifted towards us with only the creek and the birds as its soundtrack. We watched in silence as it glided around and through us like some sort of specter. We waited until it reached its end, and then I turned and watched in silence as it wafted around and through the open windows of the cabin.

Kendall turned towards me. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool.” I replied, turning back around. Lifting my coffee to my lips I took a sip and settled in to watch the next one.

Coffee Shop Characters No. 1: Mr. Rogers' Doppelganger

“I was in here earlier and some girl told me I looked like Mr. Rogers”

I looked up, and sure enough, he had been in the coffee shop earlier, as had I, and he did kind of look like Mr. Rogers.

We were both back now, me with my computer and he with a friend.

I tried not to be too obvious, but I couldn’t stop watching them. They seemed like such opposites. It made me wonder how they became friends and ended up hanging out in a coffee shop together on a Saturday morning. 

Mr. Rogers’ doppelganger wore a blue-gray sweater with a light blue collared button up on his thin frame just as you’d expect a  doppelganger of Mr. Rogers would. His combover was also reminiscent of Mr. Rogers but a little more carefree as it fell slightly in his face. And instead of dress shoes with laces at the bottom of his cargo khakis (another more casual deviation from Mr. Rogers), he wore what looked like Hey Dude knockoffs. No tying laces for this guy. He had fun blue socks on and spoke with a quiet voice. But though his voice was quiet, he did most of the talking. 

His friend on the other hand, if he had been younger, looked more like what I like to call your cliche South Carolina preppy boy. His large frame sported a teal (probably Polo, but I couldn’t be sure) polo shirt, khaki shorts, Sperry’s with ankle socks, a smart watch, and his hair was perfectly sprayed back, not one out of place. And although his voice deep carried and his laughter almost boomed, he spoke very little.

They were opposites of each other and opposite of how you think they would be, and that’s why I couldn’t stop watching them and trying to catch pieces of their conversation. Unfortunately, the noise of the fancy coffee machines making their fancy drinks in the background drowned out most of it, but I did catch this nugget when I heard loud beeping noises and looked up to see Mr. Rogers dialing out on his flip phone.

“Here” he said as he thrust the phone towards his preppy friend.

His friend took the phone and waited. “Hey! Thank you for the fancy socks.” Unfortunately, unlike Mr. Rogers, he was not wearing his fancy socks today. 

“Wait a minute.” He pulled the flip phone from his ear and stared at it, turning it from side to side. I assumed he was looking for the volume.

He put the phone back to his ear. “Go ahead. I can’t figure out how this cheap phone works.” I noticed his smart phone laying on the table.

Again, trying not to be too obvious, I couldn’t help but laugh. I immediately went back to work, recording them and their conversation in my notes, just like any writer worth their salt would do.

What My Grandma Told Us During a Thunderstorm

I love a good thunderstorm. Rain without thunder? Well, it’s just not quite as fun. My grandmother used to tell us whenever there was a big rumble of thunder that it was just God hauling his potato wagon across the bridge. Why God would be hauling potatoes across a bridge is beyond me. It does seem He probably has more important things to do. 

Whenever she’d tell us that, I’d picture God as this huge Paul Bunyan type of figure, but instead of wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, He wore a robe with a rope around his waist. He had a massive wooden wheelbarrow filled with potatoes and was just casually toting it over an arched wooden bridge in the rain. Of course there was a stream running underneath the bridge with giant rocks in it and woodlands and meadows surrounding it. In my mind, it was something straight out of a fairy tail. Where on earth my grandmother came up with this crazy story to calm us down, I’ll never know, but it worked.

We’ve been having some good thunderstorms here the last couple of days. I’m not much of a fan of gray days, but like I said, I enjoy a good thunderstorm. The dogs, on the other hand, do not enjoy them. They shake and they pant and seek out places in our tiny little apartment to hide. Tripp, in particular, prefers that we all go to the bedroom where I guess he perceives is the safest place to be. If possible, I oblige and work from my chair tucked in the corner while he either lays at my feet or hides in his corner by the closet. Unfortunately, telling them that it’s just God hauling his potato wagon across the bridge doesn’t work for them.