Pound cake and blackberries, the best of summer!

For about three weeks during the summer as the blackberries ripen, I eat breakfast standing up in the garden.  Feeling only slightly guilty, I stuff blackberries into my mouth like a grizzly bear preparing for winter.

The sensation is exquisite.  The first taste is tart, then the rich, full juices release and my mouth floods with summer sweetness.

 My blackberry bushes (all two of them) are in my sunny front garden, tucked into the back closest to the house. Not only does this provide me with easy access for those sudden blackberry cravings, but it also allows the front of the garden to look more formal, in keeping  with my classically southern style house.  If it were completely up to me, I’d plant rows of corn and mounds of squash all the way out to the street, but I’m conscious of “keeping up appearances,” in the very best sense of the phrase.  Vegetable plants, though beautiful in the eye of the beholder, are chosen for production not beauty.  With a limited amount of sunny space in front of the house, it makes sense to put the more beautiful plants where they are seen most often.

The blackberry bushes are only two years old.  I planted them spring of last year and though they looked healthy, they did not bloom (and, obviously,  also did not fruit.)  But this year the canes began putting out leaves in early spring and they are now arching over my head.

Hard experience with growing other fruits taught me that competition from the birds if fierce.  A net over the bushes has dramatically reduced this problem and, at the height of the harvest season, I have enough to pick bowls full of berries to use and share.

Though eating the berries warm off the vine is a spectacular way to enjoy blackberries, a very good alternative  is to mix them with sliced peaches, pour in a little maple syrup and serve over the world’s best pound cake (recipe below).  Top with a little ice cream and you have summer in a bowl.  Enjoy!!    

 Sally Lou’s Pound Cake

Sally Lou was the Martin family housekeeper, but like many women of her day and age, she was also nanny, cook, friend and soul mate for members of the family.  It took years for her to actually “remember”  all the ingredients for this recipe.  I offer it here to you with the love and longing for Sally Lou.  It is the world’s best pound cake recipe!

3 sticks butter                              1 teaspoon baking powder

3 cups sugar                                  1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring

3 cups flour                                   1 teaspoon almond flavoring

1 carton sour cream (8 oz.)        6 eggs, separated

1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Thoroughly cream butter and sugar.  Add the egg yolks one at a time.  Add flavorings and mix well.  Mix together flour, baking powder and salt.  Add one cup of dry mixture to the butter and sugar and blend,  then 1/2 cup sour cream and blend.  Repeat until all the flour mixture has been used, mixing well after each addition. Beat the egg whites until fluffy but not dry.  Fold into the batter, mixing carefully.  Pour into large bundt or tube pan and bake for one hour or until cake tester comes out clean.  Cool upside down on a wire rack.  This freezes really well!

*Time saver tip:  Although separating the eggs makes an exquisite, light, fluffy cake, it is almost as good when you just add the eggs whole.