Eggnog Pound Cake

My birthday week. Thirty-one on March 15th. The first birthday of the thirties. The sunflower is on my wrist, healed, permanent, the most visible evidence of the decision I made at thirty: grow toward the light. The light, at thirty-one, looks like: Sarah's Table at forty clients, a RAV4 in the driveway, a storefront napkin in my planner, a daughter who makes macarons, a son who writes fire truck stories, a toddler who says "mo heart," and a mother who told me to stop being scared and go cook.

Mama's cake: "31 — KEEP GOING." Keep going. The icing instruction. The annual Lorraine Mitchell directive, delivered in frosting, non-negotiable. 27: AND JUST GETTING STARTED. 29: ALMOST THERE. 30: AND LOOK AT YOU. 31: KEEP GOING. The cakes are a timeline. The cakes are a coaching program. The cakes are Lorraine Mitchell's way of saying everything she can't say in words, written in icing on a surface that gets eaten and disappears but leaves the words in the body. Keep going. The words are in my body now. The icing is metabolized. The instruction is cellular.

Terrence called. Happy birthday. He said: "The storefront. Do it. I believe in you. Earline believes in you. And your cornbread is already a religion — it just needs a church." The cornbread is already a religion. It just needs a church. The storefront is the church. The building where people come to worship at the altar of aggressively unsweetened cornbread and cast iron and four generations of Mitchell women who never stopped cooking. The church of Sarah's Table. The storefront. The church.

Earline's birthday spread. The tradition. Fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, collard greens, cornbread. Same as every year. Same as every birthday since I started cooking the birthday dinner myself at twenty-five. The tradition that is the spine. The tradition that holds everything upright. Thirty-one candles (Chloe lit them — supervised, barely, because the girl is eleven and can be trusted with fire, which is either progressive parenting or reckless endangerment, and I'm choosing progressive). I blew them out. I didn't make a wish. For the first time, I didn't need a wish. I have everything the wishes were for. The business. The children. The sunflower. The table. The line. Everything the candles ever promised has arrived. The candles are just light now. And light is enough.

Every year Mama writes something on my cake, and every year I eat the words. This year I wanted to give that back — to bake something for the table that carried the same weight, the same warmth, the same density of love that a Mitchell birthday demands. Earline’s spread is sacred, and it needed a cake that could sit beside fried pork chops and cornbread and not flinch. This Eggnog Pound Cake does that. It’s sturdy and rich and a little spiced, like every good thing I’ve been building — and it asks nothing of you except to slice it thick and mean it.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 1 hr 20 min | Total Time: 1 hr 40 min | Servings: 16

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp fine salt
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
3 cups granulated sugar
6 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup full-fat eggnog
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp rum extract (optional but recommended)
Powdered sugar or eggnog glaze, for finishing

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Heat oven to 325°F. Generously grease and flour a 10-inch bundt pan or tube pan, making sure to coat every crevice. Tap out any excess flour.
Mix the dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. In a large stand mixer or with a hand mixer, beat the softened butter and sugar on medium-high speed for 4 to 5 minutes until the mixture is pale, light, and noticeably fluffy. Don’t rush this step — it builds the structure of the cake.
Add the eggs. Add eggs one at a time, beating on medium speed for 30 seconds 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 eggnog in two additions (flour — eggnog — flour — eggnog — flour). Begin and end with the flour mixture. Mix only until just combined after each addition.
Add flavorings. Stir in the vanilla extract and rum extract by hand until evenly incorporated. The batter will be thick and silky.
Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake at 325°F for 75 to 85 minutes, until a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is deep golden brown. Tent with foil at the 60-minute mark if the top is browning too fast.
Cool and unmold. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes — no longer, or it may stick. Run a thin knife around the edges, then invert onto the rack and cool completely, at least 1 hour.
Finish and serve. Dust generously with powdered sugar, or drizzle with a simple eggnog glaze (1 cup powdered sugar whisked with 2 to 3 tbsp eggnog and a pinch of nutmeg). Slice thick. Serve at the table you’ve been building.

Nutrition (per serving)

Eggnog Pound Cake — The Church of Sarah’s Table, Lit Up at Thirty-One