Genius Recipes
A Simple, Sparkly Summer Pound Cake
That topping! That crust! That fluff! All from the wild, genius mind of Thalia Ho.
Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
Crunching through the snow in Tasmania on the cusp of spring, Thalia Ho looked down and saw a layer of green peeking through the ice. Her first thought: I shouldn’t have worn Doc Martens. Her second: Basil granita.
But several recipe tests in, she’d abandoned first the granita (the basil’s fragrance was muted) and then an herby cake (“the delicacy was just ruined in the heat”), settling instead on a sparkling basil sugar piled atop a buttery loaf. This was the one. And into her first cookbook, Wild Sweetness, it went. The book’s photo, shot on her bedroom floor, was almost indistinguishable from the grassy ice she’d tromped through months before.
This is the unlikely way Thalia’s book took shape, following cues from the natural world and her own memories: the burnt sugar her grandmother used to cure colds, the smoke that lingered in hair after a campfire, the vanilla that we forget is as much a flower as it is an extract in a tiny bottle.
In this case, what we get is a simple, bendable pound cake with a joyful topping you can take all sorts of other places. Scatter it over chopped strawberries or peaches, chocolate cookies, buttered toast—even sliced tomatoes. “The point of these is the sugar,” Thalia writes in Wild Sweetness. “The cake is nothing but a vehicle to transport it, albeit a good one.”
But the sugar isn’t just a way to hold the licorice-like complexities of basil, pausing it in time in a way that a sprinkle baked in never could. It also pulls the cake’s textures to extremes, deepening the line between soft fluff and crunchy crust.
Coming off an era of reduced sugar baking, it might seem odd to double down—but if we’re going to bake unseen sugar into treats and frostings and glazes, why not revel in the crunchy texture, too, rather than pretending it’s not there?
“I think we need to get more into this idea of finishing sugars, because everyone's into finishing salts and you can get so creative with those combinations,” Thalia said. “You can pile it really high or just sprinkle it lightly on—I leave the choice up to you.”
For my part, I’m piling it on.
| 1 1/2 | cups (190 grams) all-purpose flour |
| 3/4 | teaspoon baking powder |
| 1/4 | teaspoon fine salt |
| 3/4 | cup (1½ sticks/170 grams) unsalted butter, softened |
| 1 1/4 | cups (250 grams) granulated sugar |
| 3 | large eggs |
| 1 | teaspoon vanilla extract |
| Zest of 1 large lemon | |
| 1/3 | cup plus 1½ tablespoons (100 milliliters) buttermilk |
| 1 1/2 | cups (190 grams) all-purpose flour |
| 3/4 | teaspoon baking powder |
| 1/4 | teaspoon fine salt |
| 3/4 | cup (1½ sticks/170 grams) unsalted butter, softened |
| 1 1/4 | cups (250 grams) granulated sugar |
| 3 | large eggs |
| 1 | teaspoon vanilla extract |
| Zest of 1 large lemon | |
| 1/3 | cup plus 1½ tablespoons (100 milliliters) buttermilk |
| 1/2 | cup (100 grams) granulated sugar |
| 1/4 | cup (10 grams) packed basil leaves |
| Zest of ½ large lemon |
| 1/2 | cup (100 grams) granulated sugar |
| 1/4 | cup (10 grams) packed basil leaves |
| Zest of ½ large lemon |
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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3 Comments
I LOVE this finishing sugar idea, especially as I have Thai basil in my herb garden that is in need of being harvested soon. Anyone else have more ideas for what to use this finishing sugar on besides the pound cake?
I’ve been waiting to see another chef utilize finishing sugars in such a bravura method, and so tonight I’m doing a congratulatory dance in honor of her wild sweetness ideas!
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