Filed under: Food | Tags: baking, Dan Sugarman, pound cake, Sweet potatoes, Thanksgiving Recipe
First-off, imagine if I hadn’t been lazy and had posted this… wait this is the day after Thanksgiving. So this post-thanksgiving recipe is timely.
Is this a dessert? Or a side dish? I’m not sure, but we’ll find out soon, enough! It’s a straightforward pound cake, but with a little bit of a twist. My mom got this recipe from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, btw.
Ingredients:
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
- 2 cups granuated sugar
- 2 cups cooked, mashed sweet potatoes (at least two sweet potatoes)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 4 eggs
- 1 cup sifted powdered sugar
- 5 teaspoons fresh orange juice
- 2 tablespoons grated orange zest
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a ten-inch tube pan. Next mash your sweet potatoes. Quickly whipping up mashed sweet potatoes is easy. Microwave them for three to four minutes, peel them, then mash them with a fork. Easy!
Combine the dry ingredients and spices. It’s very important to combine the dry ingredients beforehand so that the spices and salt will be evenly distributed throughout the cake.
Cream the butter with the sugar (if you’re really unhealthy, like I am, then you eat some of this deliciousness), and then add the sweet potatoes and the vanilla mixing very well. Eat some of this too. Cause it’s also very tasty. Next beat in eggs, one at a time, making sure to incorporate the eggs completely. Finally, add in your combined dry ingredients, and mix until combined.
Plop the combination in the pan, and bake for an hour and ten minutes. While that bakes, combine the sifted powders sugar and the orange juice together to create a sweet glaze. When the cake is out of the oven and cooled, drizzle the glaze an sprinkle the orange zest. Voila!
TASTE TEST Very good! A disclaimer, we ran out of sweet potatoes so we substituted a cup of mashed pumpkin for a cup of sweet potato, but I didn’t really taste much pumpkin, so I don’t think the substitution made a huge difference. The most surprising aspect of the cake is its moistness. It is dense and wet. Some said that the cake could have been a bit sweeter, but I think its subdued sweetness went well with the sweet glaze. Too much of a good thing can be just too much sugar. But I wonder what would happen if instead of two cups of sweet potatoes, two cups of the syrupy sweet mashed potato casserole dish that is always at Thanksgiving and is often served with marshmellows was instead used. That would probably bring up the sweetness. In sum, a fun twist on pound cake that is even more moise and dense than a typical poundcake.
-Alex Sciuto
“It’s a great business. It’s not like being an oncologist of some shit like that. You know. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. You’re never gonna get rich, but why would you need to. I don’t need to do a bunch of coke to be happy.” That’s a quote from a New York Diner Cook and owner who was videoed by the New York Times. It’s very funny, profane, and you learn how to make macaroni and cheese pancakes!
-Carolyn Frischer
Filed under: Food
Last night, I was blessed with the extremely good fortune of getting to travel to downtown Dundas to eat at Fermentations Wine Bar and Bistro, and it was the best meal I’ve had in Minnesota (that’s not saying much at all, I know.)
Getting to Fermentations was very easy and quick, and exposed just how little I’ve ever explored the greater-Northfield area. I don’t believe I’ve ever driven further south on highway 3 than Target and Cub Foods. To get to Fermentations, we had to double that southern distance, eventually taking a right. After winding through a few residential blocks, downtown Dundas revealed itself. Composed of a single half a street with two or three commercial-looking buildings, a parking lot, and a runned down stone ruin, downtown Dundas left a lot to be desired.
The restaurant is located in the right half of a small one-story repurposed building. While space was at a premium (I joked with my fellow reviewers, whom I had flown out from Manhattan, New York so that they could give their expert critique of the food, that the restaurant was tiny enough to be located in Midtown! We all laughed heartily at my wit.), the dining room was tastefully designed and furnished. Nothing to radical, just a combination of warm woods and modern fixtures.
But to the food. I started with the crab cakes appetizer. I was served five moderatlely large cakes circling a center of home-made tartar sauce. The portion was large enough to be a meal itself. I’m a big fan of crab cakes, and I try to have them everywhere I go. These tasted like the best of what I’ve had. They had the delicate texture of crab meat and weren’t too oily or too dry. But they really excelled in the seasoning. Very well balanced between the crab meat and the spices mixed with it. I wish I could have gotten an order to go.









