Buttermilk Pound Cake

Carrie graduated from Emory on Saturday, May 10th, 2026. She walked across the stage in her cap and gown and received her diploma and the walking was the completing, the completing was the beginning, and the beginning is the teaching life that waits in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia will have her for two years of a master's in education.

The ceremony was attended by four: Naomi, Robert, James, and Elise. We sat in the audience and we watched and we clapped and the clapping was the celebration, the sound of four people who love a woman who has spent six years earning a degree and who has earned it, and the earning is the degree, and the degree is the earning.

After the ceremony, Carrie hugged me and said, "Mom, I did it." The echo of James's graduation three years ago — "I did it, Grandma" — was not accidental. The echo was the family: the same words, different mouths, the achievement announced in the same four words, the words being the Blackwood-Simmons way of saying what has been accomplished: simply, directly, without embellishment, the way Mama said "That's right" when the soup was perfect.

I made the graduation dinner at a restaurant in Atlanta — not my cooking, because the cooking was four hundred miles from my kitchen, but the choosing was mine: a restaurant that served shrimp and grits and she-crab soup and that was, for one evening, the Lowcountry transplanted to Georgia, the food traveling with the family the way it has always traveled: in the choosing, in the eating, in the love.

We didn’t have cake at the restaurant that night — we had she-crab soup and shrimp and grits and the kind of happiness that doesn’t need a menu. But when I got home, back to my own kitchen four hundred miles north, I made this buttermilk pound cake the way Mama used to make it: slowly, simply, without embellishment. It is the cake I reach for when something has been earned and deserves to be marked, when “I did it” needs something sweet and solid to stand beside it — the way the Lowcountry food traveled with us to Atlanta, this cake travels with me back to every celebration worth remembering.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 1 hour 15 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 35 minutes | Servings: 12

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3 cups granulated sugar
6 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prepare. Preheat oven to 325°F. Generously grease and flour a 10-inch tube or Bundt pan, tapping out any excess flour.
Combine dry ingredients. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3–4 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and continue beating until pale and well combined, about 3 minutes more.
Add eggs. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.
Alternate wet and dry. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the buttermilk in two additions, beginning and ending with the flour. Mix just until combined — do not overmix. Stir in the vanilla extract and lemon zest if using.
Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes, or until a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is deep golden brown.
Cool. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes, then invert onto the rack and cool completely before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Buttermilk Pound Cake — The Sweetness of “I Did It”