Tarting Up Your Pound Cake

My sweet tooth is relentless. My favorite words are sugar and butter. I taste batter by the spoonful, not the lick (don’t do this, they say it’s unsafe). I refuse to add nuts to brownies, because they take up too much room. I have never once allowed a cookie to “cool completely” before tearing into it like a flea-bitten medieval serf. I dream about ice cream. I thirst for hot chocolate. If I were on death row, my last meal would be caramels dipped in hot fudge. I could go on, but you get the point. My signature colors are simple and sweet. 

The apex product for those of us afflicted by (blessed with?) this kind of sugar-lust is pound cake. Dense, moist, rich, thick, sugary pound cake. Happiness really is a fat, golden slab of it, so heavy with butter that lifting a forkful to your mouth counts as a bicep curl. Pound cake is a perfect—and increasingly rare—expression of culinary clarity. It is what it is (butter, sugar, flour, eggs), and it is nothing more. It doesn’t need to be.