Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Green Pound Cake for St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day is March 17th so you have one whole week to buy the ingredients to make this green pound cake. The recipe makes two loaves. You probably have all of the ingredients on hand right now. The only things I don't have are buttermilk and avocado. Actually, I do have one avocado but need another one to make 1-1/2 cups. Market day is today so I'll buy several more. This looks good and the green color is natural without the addition of food coloring. Pistachio ice cream is green, isn't it? That would be good on the side. Yum. Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
Avocado Pound Cake
I think I'll eliminate one cup of sugar. I don't like things that are too sweet. I'm sure that won't make a difference in the baking chemistry, will it?



2 comments:

Lynn C said...

I would love to hear how this turns out. It looks beautiful. I heard that if you heat the avocado it would turn bitter -maybe that is why it has so much sugar.... Thanks for all your wonderful posts. It is a true pleasure visiting your blog. Sincerely, Lynn C. from North Carolina

Unknown said...

Well from the start I knew this was going to be a...greeeeeen mess.
Three quarters of a cup of butter and THREE cups of sugar dfo not make something light and fluffy even after ten minutes of high speed mixing.... It looked more like wet yellow sand. I should have stopped there... But the avocados were just ripe and mashing them gave me the will to pursue.
Alas, four eggs and 3/4 cup of buttermilk later the whole thing was a soggy mess.
Nevertheless I poured the batter into two 8.5 x 4 x 4 bread molds and popped them in the oven at 350F then lowered the heat (as instructed in the recipe) to 325F...
After 40 minutes, I had bubbling lava of a non-descript color. Not green. An hour later, same thing... Luckily, I had filled a ramekin with leftover batter to make a small cake the size of a large muffin. This small cake took 75 minutes to allow a toothpick to come out clean. The two loafpans had stopped bubbling at that time and a crust was sealing the top of the cakes so I pursued the baking of the loaf for a total of three hours with no great hope. I finally removed them from the oven and they immediately deflated hiding a soggy mess that was discarded at once.
As for the baked little cake... After cooling on a rack, it was cut and a yellowish beige cake appeared. It was bland (yes, after three cups of sugar!) and went the same way the two loaves had gone... in the garbage.
Joy the baker better edit her recipe soon as I am sure I will not be the only one to complain.
By the way, I had all the ingredients well measured and am an experience baker that should have followed my initial hunch and lost only three cups of sugar and a little butter instead of almost three hours of what started like a wonderful evening...

Dan C, New York, NY