How to Unsuccessfully Salvage a Pound Cake

The local county fair used to be brimming with works of art by local children. It was free to enter and the chance at a $3.00 first prize and a blue ribbon was almost irresistible to these young budding artists. Most children entered as many categories as they could. If you were really talented and your work caught the attention of the judges, you could walk away with the coveted tri-color ribbon even though it didn't increase the cash payout.

My son was one of the talented that walked away with quite a few first place ribbons, two of the tri-colored ribbons, and a fistful of crisp $1 bills. My daughter saw her share of blue ribbons over the years, but never quite seemed to capture the tri-colored ribbon.

My son Kevin passed away in 2003 and my husband of 23 years and I divorced. When the county fair came back around it was just my daughter and I living alone. The fair was a reminder of how much we missed Kevin. We were somehow more determined to make a good showing at the fair in honor of Kevin.

Each year the fair had some sort of baking competition for the kids. It was usually something fairly simple. This particular year the category was "Pound Cakes". We didn't particularly have a unique recipe for pound cake so we set out to find a variety of pound cake recipes and to create our own based on the key ingredients found in the majority of the others.

My daughter picked about a dozen arts and crafts categories that she could display her original works of art in as well.

Entrants were asked to bring their fresh-baked cake to the fairgrounds between a couple of hours one early Saturday morning. I have forgotten why we couldn't bake the cake the night before, but we also wanted to ensure freshness by getting up early to bake the cake early Saturday morning.

Waking up far earlier than one cares to on a Saturday, we headed to the kitchen to begin whipping up this masterpiece. I had gone over everything with her beforehand so all I had to do was supervise. She mixed all of the ingredients and with much pride she placed it into the loaf pan and placed it into the oven.

There was a slight problem. Since we had devised our own recipe from pieces of many others, we really didn't have a concrete cook time for the cake. I didn't think this would be a problem though and told her we'd simply bake it until a knife poked in the middle comes out clean. Seemed simple enough.

We were running out of time and we needed to get to the fairgrounds which was about a thirty minute drive away. We nervously kept checking the pound cake looking for signs of doneness. It was browning quite nicely but with the denseness of the batter we weren't seeing the inside quite develop into the firm moist middle that it needed to be. Finally, with the clocking ticking we had to remove the cake from the oven if it was going to cool enough to remove it from the pan. We still had to pretty it up for display.

Something just didn't seem right with the cake. In our haste I hadn't done the knife in the middle test one last time. I thought I should try it. I wasn't pleased with the results so I decided I was going to have to get to the middle of this cake since we certainly didn't want a judge to cut into it and find it raw in the middle.

Slowly I began to cut into the cake. The firmness of the outer portion was certainly encouraging. It smelled pretty good as well. Then I hit the middle. As I pulled the two halves apart a hot molten river of pound cake goo oozed out. To our horror, the middle was raw. Ordinarily, you could place the two halves back together and put them back in the pan to place in the oven and finish cooking. We had no time left. We needed to go. My daughter looked at me with big tears in her eyes. I looked back at the cake and back at her. I knew we were fighting a lost cause, but its so hard to give up when I knew how much it meant to her.

I convinced her that we could make this work. But, I also knew we couldn't present the judges with raw cake batter. So, I took a big spoon and started scraping out the raw parts to see what we had left to work with. It wasn't much. I decided that since there were no size specifications for the cake, we could try to shorten the loaf by simply removing the middle and trying to get the two ends to somehow meld themselves together since the cake was still warm.

That seemed like a good idea, right? The scraping away of raw batter actually took away more cake than we had good cake to fill in, but we tried it anyway. We took bits of cooked cake from the portion we cut out and poked them into the cavity left by the scraped out raw portions and slid the two halves together and hoped it would somehow magically form a solid looking loaf.

My daughter strategically placed the halves on a paper doily, added a silk flower to the side and we raced to the car. We arrived at the fairgrounds with no idea which entrance to use and choosing the wrong one cost us a few a minutes, but we finally made it to the judges' table. We stood in line with kids with the most beautiful pound cakes. My daughter looked up at me with the saddest eyes as she realized that no one else had a cake that looked like ours. I assured her that would make us stand out with the judges, it was a good thing. We were told to check back in about an hour and the judges would have the results.

We spent the hour sitting in front of the exhibits building relaxing for the first time that morning. We laughed at the frenzy of activity we had just gone through and it actually began to sink in that we had really made a mess of that cake.

It was one of those hours where there was no one else in the world but just the two of us. We were oblivious to the other fair-goers as we sat there half laughing half crying about our ordeal. It was a bonding moment as I consoled my daughter for a project that we botched but we were still able to laugh at the absurd way we handled trying to salvage it.

At last, it was time to see what the judges had to say.

It was announced that the winning entries were placed on a table at the front and all others could be found on a table to the side. We quickly glanced across the cakes at the winning table and couldn't find our entry. We found it on the table on the side. I sighed a sigh of relief as I noticed that the judges had only cut into the outside edge of the cake to sample it. That meant that they had never gotten to the hollowed out middle now containing chunks of cake.

My daughter retrieved her participation ribbon and we practically ran to the car laughing so hard we cried. To this day, we still laugh about our pound cake experience. We have yet to try that recipe again.