Citrus Pound Cake a la Cheryl Day @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: You might remember (or maybe not!) that I promised I'd be cooking/baking this year from Cheryl Day's Treasury of Southern Baking? It's a gorgeous book with a poignant backstory and I highly recommend it. Here is my first foray into the recipes, a big citrus almond pound cake that will serve a crowd, happily. She made the original recipe with lots of lemon--I focused on orange, lime, and some grapefruit.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups cake flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

1/2 cup whole milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup almond paste (Most of a tube)

1 cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons grated orange zest

2 teaspoons grated key lime zest

Two sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

Four large eggs, room temperature

For the glaze:

3/4 cup confectioners sugar

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1 teaspoon grated orange zest

1/2 teaspoon grated Key lime zest

1 tablespoon fresh orange juice




Mix the dry ingredients in a small bowl and set those aside.

Mix the milk with the vanilla and set this aside.

Place the almond paste in your KitchenAid or a bowl with beaters, and beat until it has a sandy appearance.




Add the sugar and the citrus zest and beat that until well mixed.

Add the butter gradually, beating until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time while the beater is still running.




Add the dry mixture alternately with the milk, mixing only until combined.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Grease a bundt pan well with butter, sprinkle with flour and shake the excess out.



Scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 50 minutes or so. (I left mine in for 55 minutes and felt it was slightly overcooked.)

Let the cake cool for 20 minutes, then invert onto a cake plate.

Beat the glaze ingredients together and paint this on to the cake once it’s completely cooled. 

Since this is not a messy cake, it's perfectly fine to eat while reading!

Last but not least, A DISH TO DIE FOR, #12 in the Key West food critic mystery series, will be out on August 9, but is now available for preorder wherever books are sold

About A Dish to Die For:

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.

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