southern culture

This is the tale of two treats. What does a pound cake recipe and a macaron recipe have in common with Two-Sided Southern? One is down home and one is more uptown.

My love for baking comes from a line of born-and-raised North Carolina Southern women armed with delicious recipes. That, and I married into the right last name. They are both sweet, delicious desserts that require a touch of finesse to get them executed right. But your average Southern bakery isn’t going to sell macarons. And a classic French patisserie isn’t going to have a pound cake. So make them yourself.

By Suzanne Baker

First, The Story of the Pound Cake Recipe

You can’t get a more classic, simple Southern dessert then one made of sugar, butter, eggs, and flour. Combined just right, they bake a pound cake.

Traditional Southern pound cake has only the four ingredients listed above, but to me, it tends to be a pretty dense cake. I also believe in tradition and my Grandma Wilson’s pound cake recipe includes a small amount of baking powder and some milk, which leads to a fluffier cake with a crisp crust.

She was locally known for her cakes and desserts in her small town on the edges of Greensboro, NC. She took great pride in always having a pound cake in her baking tin. If you were lucky, there was a hot cake cooling on the stove when you came to visit. 

Perfecting her pound cake has become one of my life’s missions since she passed in 2018. So much so that in 2019 I submitted a plain pound cake and chocolate pound cake into the North Carolina State Fair and I. Got. A. Ribbon.

My plain pound cake won a green Honorable Mention ribbon. But say I won fourth place due to how the cake submissions were placed in the case. (See above!) It was truly a moment of pride that I was able to continue my Grandma’s legacy.

While it took my mom 35 years of watching my grandma to get the full recipe, I’ll share it right here. I believe sweets should be shared rather than kept secret. And I know we all have our special take on a recipe to make it ours. 

Grandma Wilson’s Pound Cake Recipe

• 1 cup 2 sticks butter (at room temperature)
• ⅓ cup Crisco
• 3 cups sugar
• 3 cups all purpose flour (like White Lily brand)
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon lemon extract
• ¼ teaspoon almond extract
• 1 cup milk (at room temperature)
• 6 eggs (at room temperature)

1. Morning of baking, place milk, eggs, and butter on the counter to come to room temperature. If you forget or want to bake early, you can warm the milk in the microwave for 20-30 seconds, put the eggs in warm water, and carefully soften butter in microwave. You just don’t want to melt the butter!
2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
3. Cream butter, Crisco, and sugar in mixer until light and fluffy. This may take a few minutes. It will become a pale yellow color.
4. While butter and sugar are mixing, grease a bundt pan with crisco. Then flour to cover all of area you just crisco’d. Fill in any missed spots with more crisco to ensure the cake doesn’t stick.
5. Measure and sift flour and baking powder.

6. Add vanilla, almond, and lemon extract.

7. Alternate mixing flour and milk into the creamed butter and sugar until completely mixed.
8. Add one egg at a time mixing for 20ish seconds between each egg until all are incorporated.
9. Pour batter into your greased and floured bundt pan.
10. Bake for 1 hour. You don’t want the cake to be gooey/jiggly on top but a little soft batter isn’t a bad thing in my opinion!

For a chocolate variation, add ¼ cup cocoa powder to the flour mixture and use ½ cup crisco. Adjust vanilla, almond, and lemon extract amounts to your liking. 

Now, for the Macaron Recipe…

Macarons are fancy and their typical price at a bakery confirms the class. I’ve seen a single 1-inch round macaron go for $5-plus. It’s two bites of goodness, but they can be pricey!

What makes them high brow is the ingredients are expensive and they require a good bit of finesse to properly bake them. Compared to a pound cake, you can’t just throw all of the ingredients into a mixer and come out with a batter. You have to follow the recipe to a T, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s totally worth it.  

I took my first stab at baking macarons in early 2020. I was inspired by Instagram baking influencer Erin Clarkson of Cloudy Kitchen. She is a self-coined “New Zealander living in Brooklyn.” You should go give her a follow for her fun recipes. (Her cookies are killer!) She has a macaron recipe and Instagram highlight that inspired me to give this notoriously difficult-to-bake cookie a try.

My cookies came out looking right with the frilly foot and flat top. But they didn’t have the cakey texture that is challenging to get just right. A year later, after being pregnant with our second baby and not wanting to bake, I was ready to try again. This time I took a macaron baking class at Whisk Carolina to learn some tips and tricks. The recipe method below is a little different than Cloudy Kitchen’s, but I find it to be a little less tricky. It uses a mixer the entire time and also an Italian meringue base.

I’ve sprinkled in a few tips I learned in each of the steps below. In no way shape or form am I an expert at making these macarons. But maybe this will inspire other home cooks to give them a go. Even if you don’t get the texture right the first time, the cookie will still taste yummy.

Recipe adapted from Whisk Carolina baking class and Jacquy Pfeiffer’s “The Art of French Pastry: A Cookbook.”

French Macarons Recipe

Recipe adapted from Whisk Carolina baking class and Jacquy Pfeiffer’s “The Art of French Pastry” cook book.

• Buy yourself a kitchen scale (~$10 on Amazon) and measure these ingredients by weight. Weight is not commonly used in the U.S. but once you start baking with weight you’ll see how much more accurate your baking can be.
• You’ll also need an instant read thermometer (~$10 on Amazon). I use mine for everything in the kitchen, especially baking and meat cooking.
• Costco has the cheapest almond flour I’ve seen! Aldi has a good price too.
• I bought a Silpat non-stick macaron sheet and it is great! You can also use parchment paper with circles drawn on it to help keep all of the cookies a similar shape and size.
• I have two mixing bowls for my mixer. This was really helpful but you can always clean the bowl between each step.

• 10.5 ounces powdered sugar
• 10.5 ounces almond flour
• 7 ounces egg whites (divided into two 3.5-ounce portions)
• 10.5 ounces sugar
• 0.25 ounces meringue powder
• 2.75 ounces water

1. Read this recipe all the way through a few times before giving it a go!

2. Two days before baking (Not required but helpful!): Measure out almond flour and powdered sugar. Lay flat on a big baking sheet to dry out.

   Measure out egg whites in two bowls and cover with plastic wrap that has holes poked in it to allow some of the water to evaporate. (Save the yolks to make a filling for your macarons like lemon curd or a french buttercream).

3. Weigh out remaining ingredients before getting started.
4. Sift almond flour and powdered sugar to get rid of any larger clumps.

5. Mix almond flour and powdered sugar mixture together with the first 3.5 ounces of egg whites. Mix until all ingredients are incorporated. You may need to scrape the sides and bottom to help it incorporate.

6. Add your gel coloring to this mixture. Typically the color identifies the flavor of the filling. For example, choose pink for raspberry flavor or yellow for lemon. Your color will not be evenly distributed but it will even out as it continues to mix.

7. If using one mixing bowl, this is where you will need to take the almond, sugar, egg white paste mixture out of your mixing bowl and clean your bowl to prep for making the italian meringue.

8. With your whisk attachment and in your clean/second mixing bowl, begin whipping the remaining 3.5 ounces of egg whites on low.

9. Add a teaspoon of sugar to your meringue powder and mix together. This helps the powder not clump up when you add it to your egg whites. Once the eggs whites are foamy, slowly pour in the sugar and powder mixture then start increasing the speed of your mixer to medium (5-6).

10. While your egg whites are mixing on medium-low, start making your sugar syrup. In a small saucepan, add water then pour remaining sugar into water. Do not mix or stir. Cook on medium-high until the sugar dissolves and your instant read thermometer reads 243 degrees. If it gets too hot, start the process over. Again, don’t stir the mixture.

11. Once sugar syrup is done, turn your mixer to medium-high (4-6) and slowly pour it into the egg whites. Be careful to not pour the hot syrup onto the whisk. It’s a delicate balance of resting the pan on the edge of the mixer while pouring between the whisk and side.
12. Keep the mixer going on low to medium speed until the mixture is close to room temperature. You should be able to put your hands on the bottom of your mixer bowl and it will not be warm. This will take a few minutes.
13. If you’re using one bowl, this is where you will need to transfer the meringue into another bowl. With your paddle attachment on stir/low speed, mix ⅓ of the meringue into the almond mixture. Scrape the bowl. It’s going to be a gooey mess and you won’t have all of the meringue incorporated at this point.
14. Mix the next ⅓ of the meringue. Scrape the bowl.
15. Mix the final ⅓ of the meringue until all is incorporated.
16. Clean off the paddle and give the bowl a couple of stirs / scrapes along the edge with a spatula.
17. Transfer batter into a piping bag fitted with a large round piping tip (like Wilton #12). Use a rubber band to secure the end of the bag. Pipe similar sized round circles of batter onto your non-stick mat or parchment paper.
18. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees while the cookies dry.
19. Let piped cookies rest for 45 minutes to an hour. This allows the top of the cookie to dry out which creates the infamous frilly foot. If you want to add sprinkles on top, do it right after piping a pan so they stick.
20. Bake for 12-15 minutes depending on your oven. You’ll want to rotate the pan and change levels if you’re cooking 2 pans at a time midway through baking. When they’re done they won’t shake when you press your finger on top and they will easily lift off the pan.
21. Let cool on the pan until at room temperature. Fill them with your favorite flavored filling (swiss meringue buttercream, american buttercream, lemon or lime curd, jelly, chocolate ganache, etc.).
22. Refrigerate and enjoy!