A Special Place Cake

If the grocery store isn't your favorite place, it should be. We're sleuthing for the best back-of-the-box recipes and every Sunday, Posie Harwood from 600 Acres will share our latest find. 

Today: Why you should be eating your (brown sugar pound) cake with a view.

Cake is always welcome. It's good in all seasons. It improves a bad day and makes a good one even better. But I'd like to make an argument for cake with a view.

I found the recipe for this pound cake on the back of the brown sugar box weeks ago. I planned on baking it in my kitchen in my New York apartment and photographing it on my tiny windowsill. Instead, I found myself at home in Maryland, on the farm where I grew up, with a warm, sunny afternoon stretching out in front of me. So naturally, I baked.

  

Once the cake was finished and glazed, I took it outside to the porch. I ate a slice looking out over the ponds, watching our two Yorkshire pigs cool off in the stream in their pasture, and listening to the quiet all around me.

This cake—a moist, finely crumbed specimen with a deeply caramelized sweetness from the brown sugar—would taste very good anywhere. You could make it for a picnic, for a summer clambake, or for breakfast. But there's something undeniable about the effect of place and atmosphere on food: I think anything tastes better when eaten outside in the summer surrounded by lush green acres of forest and farmland. That's my place. You'll have your own place.

Find somewhere quiet and beautiful and wild: your garden, the beach at sunset, a trailhead, a fire escape. Bring a friend. Eat this cake there. 

Brown Sugar Pound Cake

Adapted from Domino Sugar

Makes one 9-inch loaf

For the cake:

1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
4 eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

For the optional glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar
2 to 3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Do you have a favorite back of the box recipe, or have you heard about a great one? Leave any suggestions in the comments, and I'll try them out and share them here!

Photos by Posie Harwood