Pound cakes.

The days right before Passover I began to want pound cake more than anything in the world, and I swore that as soon as Passover was over I was going to start making pound cakes. It took me about a month to bake anything, after Passover was through — I’ve been really busy — but I did finally bake two pound cakes. One of them was a real pain to make (it involved separating eggs and whipping the whites to soft peaks, in addition to everything else) and one of them was pretty easy. One of them was sublime, and one of them was, despite my best efforts, entirely mediocre.

I want to say, “The lesson learned is, good pound cakes require effort like whipping egg whites,” but I know this isn’t the case. The Gourmensch remembers as well as I do that about ten years ago I occasionally made a really excellent chocolate chip poundcake; the recipe was in a cookbook I cooked out of all the time. I used to make this cake every couple of months, a big cake it was, baked in a tube pan, and it would disappear within about three days. This means, by the way, that he and I were eating truly revolting quantities of cake every day. But it was so good, we didn’t care.

Problem is, I can’t remember which of my books had that recipe.

So I’m thrown back to hunting for good pound cake recipes. We will eat up the last of the bad one I made — because my husband and child declared it perfectly good and we have no intention of throwing it out; it has chocolate chips in it, after all (which sank! and they weren’t supposed to sink! I coated them in flour before mixing them in, why’d they sink?), so it isn’t just trash. And when it is gone, I will start working again. I will figure out if there is a way to make a truly excellent poundcake without having to whip egg whites.

There is probably a book somewhere which is nothing but poundcake recipes. If there isn’t, perhaps I should start assembling one.