We’ve been invited to dinner, and so I offered to bring dessert. I immediately thought of this recipe for Blackberries and Peaches in Sweet Basil Syrup with Cornmeal Pound Cake, which I spotted recently in an e-mail newsletter from Garden & Gun magazine. (What? You don’t know G&G? You should, absolutely. It’s a wonderful, New South publication with great writing and recipes that those of us north of the Mason-Dixon can appreciate. If you bypass the magazine, do sign up for their newsletter.)
Anyhoo, I figured this dessert would be perfect—easily made ahead and transported, and a great way to highlight seasonal farmers’ market fruit.
I assembled the fruit: sliced peaches and blackberries bathed in a sweet wine syrup flavored with lemon and basil.
Then onto the cake. I’ve made pound cakes countless times, and they’re not complex creatures. For whatever reason, I envisioned bread-like slices of cake beneath a pile of fruit on the plate. So I used a Pyrex loaf pan instead of the 9-inch round cake pan the recipe suggested.
Bad idea.
After the requisite baking time, I poked a toothpick into the cake. Something seemed off. I added another 4 minutes to the timer … then another 5 … and then another 2. The top was a gorgeous, nutty brown color, but the texture seemed … hmm. So I took the cake out of the oven—and in very short order, it caved in on itself, the center completely underbaked. The middle third of the cake was a gummy mess.
Surely, I couldn’t tote this disaster to dinner. Being the “make-lemonade-with-life’s-lemons” type, I whacked the fully baked ends off, wrapped them in plastic and saved them for another day. I had enough ingredients to make another cake (flour, eggs, sugar and butter being staples in my kitchen).
The upshot of all this—and kitchen disasters most often do have an upshot, unless you catch something on fire—is that I salvaged the cooked part of the middle section and ate it, along with half a sliced peach, for dessert at noon. I mean, who has dessert at lunchtime? As an added bonus, I got to lick the batter bowl.
Twice.
A few years back, everything in my life was going wrong: I’d lost my grandmother and mother within months of each other; our house was robbed; my boss was a deranged psycho. I was going to a dinner party and made something that was supposed to be a cake-and-fruit combo similar to yours. Disaster. The center never cooked, and by the time I realized that the center wasn’t ever going to be salvaged, the edges were getting much too dark. So… I let it cool, got out the knife and cut the edible pieces into cubes, and stopped at the supermarket along the way for a pint of whipping cream that I prepared at my friend’s house. I tossed the fruit and cake cubes together, topped with fresh whipped cream, and nobody ever knew. Until now.
Somehow when I rearranged a sentence I dropped the key part of the comment, which was that while everything was going wrong, I got really good at adapting to things on the fly. The cake was one of my better examples.
Alisa, that’s a great story! Once you get past the dark cloud of fury over a project gone wrong, there’s something intensely satisfying about finding a way to salvage things. Great save!
There’s nothing wrong with dessert for lunch! Besides, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do! Glad it all worked out in the end.
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