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Pyramid Pound Cake
One pound sugar, one of butter, one of flour, ten eggs; bake in a dripping-pain one inch in thickness; cut when cold into pieces three and a half inches long by two wide, and frost top and sides; form on the cake stand in pyramid before the icing is quite dry by laying, first in a circle, five pieces with some space between them; over the spaces between these lay five other pieces, gradually drawing in the column and crowning the top with a bouquet of flowers. -Mrs. Dr. Thompson.
A classic four-equal-parts pound cake baked flat and cut into bricks for a table centerpiece. The baking is straightforward; the arithmetic and the assembly are where it goes wrong.
- Pan size and quantityA dripping-pan is the shallow rectangular pan set under a roast — the closest modern equivalent is a half-sheet pan (13x18 inches). Spread the batter to the depth needed for a finished cake about one inch thick, as the recipe specifies, so the pieces cut cleanly into pyramid blocks.
- OvenBake at 325-350F. A one-inch sheet of pound batter is done in 20 to 30 minutes, far faster than the loaf or tube pound cakes most cooks know, and it dries out quickly past that point.
- EggsEggs of the period often ran smaller than today's large egg, though sizes varied widely. If you would rather weigh: about 1 lb (450-500 g) of whole egg out of the shell is nine to ten large eggs.
- No leavening, so the creaming is the hingeThere is no baking powder here — every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, then add the eggs a little at a time so the batter never breaks. A curdled batter gives a dense, greasy sheet that will not hold a stacked shape.
- Flour measurementA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped, but weigh it. Fold it in by hand at the end; beating flour into an eggy batter toughens it and pound cake has no leavener to hide the damage.
- Icing for a structureThe recipe assumes an icing that sets hard — a royal-style icing of egg white and confectioners' sugar, which is what "before the icing is quite dry" means. Use pasteurized egg white or meringue powder for an uncooked icing. A soft buttercream will slump and the pyramid will collapse.
- Cut cold, ideally chilledCut the fully cooled sheet with a long serrated knife; an hour in the refrigerator first makes the 3 1/2 by 2 inch pieces come out square. Trim the crusted edges before measuring or the outer bricks will not match.
- Yield and assemblyTrimmed, the sheet yields enough for four or five tiers of five with spares. Build directly on the serving stand; the finished pyramid is not easily moved. The crowning 'bouquet of flowers' may well have been real blooms, so choose non-toxic ones and keep stems out of the cake.
Pound cake takes its name from its formula rather than its flavor: a pound each of sugar, butter, flour and eggs, a ratio that survives in the French quatre-quarts and that made the cake memorizable in an era when many cooks worked without written receipts and without standardized measuring cups. What is distinctive here is not the batter but the architecture. Buckeye Cookery — first issued in 1876 in Marysville, Ohio as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book and later reissued in revised form as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping — belongs to the period when middle-class American entertaining prized the constructed centerpiece — pyramids, towers and baskets of frosted cake, macaroons or fruit, assembled with hardened icing as mortar and topped with flowers. The book's recipes are largely contributed and signed, as this one is by Mrs. Dr. Thompson, a convention that lent each entry the authority of a particular housekeeper's own table and turned the collection into a sort of communal reference for a congregation or town.