What I've done this weekend

At Starbucks before church.

Finished this up on Friday night. Don't look at the zipper installation; somewhere over the last year, I've lost my zipper mojo. Pretty funny, considering that I used so many of the new features on the machine successfully on this little bag, only to have less than optimal results on something I used to be able to do with my eyes shut.

It does indeed contain ink, in the form of my favorite architect's pens. I'm not sure who first recommended these to me, but I love them for writing. There are assorted fine point scrapbooking pens mixed in the lot as well.

This afternoon I turned to a more risky endeavor: baking. I'm off to a friend's for dinner tonight, and I said I'd bring dessert. If she is going to the trouble of making a home made meal, I can't very well bring a bag of Oreos and some ice cream for dessert.

A tiptoe through the Baking With Julia cookbook turned up a recipe for classic pound cake. I adore pound cake, but rarely buy it and have never made it. There's always a first time, right? Besides, the most difficult part of the recipe is greasing and flouring the tube pan.

I'm not sure this will make it to Pam's
without being cut into..

Yes, the recipe called for baking the cake in a tube pan, rather than a traditional loaf pan. Okay then...a tube pan just happens to be something I have (in my "twelve things" I can bake, I've a killer chocolate chiffon cake that bakes in a tube pan).

A pound cake is called a pound cake because the original proportions called for a pound of butter, pound of sugar and pound of eggs...this only takes half a pound of butter, two cups of sugar and three eggs, but that's probably more than enough. It's also a "vanilla" cake, with two teaspoons of good Mexican vanilla added at the very end of mixing.

The house smells fantastic right now. I've raspberries to macerate and serve over the cake; Pam said she has a bit of ice cream. Sounds about perfect to me.