By Senior year of high school started Monday. Sapulpa High, the same building I’ve walked into every August since ninth grade, except this is the last first day of school I’m ever going to have, and the last time I’m ever going to walk in not knowing the schedule yet, and the last August I’ll spend buying back-to-school clothes from the mall in Tulsa with the green-envelope money. I drove the truck to school instead of riding the bus and parked in the senior lot for the first time, in row two, third spot from the end, and I sat there with the engine off for a minute looking at the building before I got out, because some thresholds want a minute. The senior lot is a small thing. It mattered anyway.
Mr. Briggs was teaching senior English this year — he’d had me in junior English last year and he’d been the one to put Linda’s college research list on his classroom desk for me on the last day of school, the list of which schools take which kinds of writing samples, the list with TCC’s culinary-and-business associate’s circled in red and OSU-Tulsa underlined twice. He saw me in the hall before first period, on my way to AP Government, and he smiled and said, “You ready, Turner?” the way he’d ask anybody, except his eyes weren’t casual at all. I told him I was. He said, “Good. Because we’re going to apply to TCC’s culinary program this year and we’re going to mean it.” Then he walked into his classroom. I stood in the hallway for two seconds before I went on to first period. TCC has been on his list for me since spring. It’s now on mine for real, and the way he said it — “we’re going to mean it” — flipped a switch I’d been carrying turned-off for self-protection.
Mama wanted to mark the first week back, in her quiet way, so I made a strawberry cream cheese pound cake Saturday afternoon — her favorite, the one with eight ounces of full-fat cream cheese folded into the batter so it stays moist for four full days on the counter under the glass dome we got from a yard sale in 2014. Strawberries were on sale at IGA Saturday morning for two dollars and fifty cents a pound on the rolling cart by the front, two pounds for four-fifty if you took both, because they were past their prettiest — soft on one side, a few of them with that translucent edge that means they’re hours from going bad. I bought both pounds and used them for a macerated topping with a third of a cup of sugar, the zest of a lemon, and a splash — maybe a teaspoon — of the cheap balsamic vinegar from the back of the pantry.
The macerated topping was the best version I’ve ever made, and here’s the lesson buried in it: past-prime strawberries macerate better than fresh ones. The fresh ones, the firm pretty ones, are too structurally tight to release their juice in the forty-five minutes you’ve got the bowl resting on the counter. The older ones, the ones the produce section is trying to move, surrender their juice almost immediately because their cell walls have already started breaking down. By the time the cake came out of the oven and rested an hour, my bowl of strawberries had thrown a half-cup of glossy red syrup at the bottom and tasted like jam without ever touching heat.
The cake itself I bake at three-twenty-five for an hour and ten in the loaf pan, butter and flour the pan first, and I tap the pan on the counter twice before it goes in to settle the batter. The cream cheese keeps it from going dry past day two, which is the failure mode of regular pound cake. Day three’s slice tastes the same as day one’s. Mama took a piece in her lunchbag every morning of the first week of school and said it was “like having a hug at lunch break.”
Wednesday at writing program, I read the second half of the Cody piece — eight more pages, sixteen total now, the full arc, ending with the visitation pass folded into the square Mama made small enough to swallow. Marcus said exactly one thing when I finished, in front of the whole room: “Submit that to Sewanee Review next year. It will publish.” I had to look up Sewanee Review on the library computer afterward. It’s the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in America — the kind of place where Wallace Stegner and Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy first appeared. Marcus had said it the way someone might say you should call your mother — like it was just the obvious next step, no big deal, of course you’d do that. I sat at that library computer for a long time. Iris stayed late again that night and we sat in Marcus’s classroom after the others left and she asked me, very quietly, if I’d be willing to be her primary reader for the grandmother piece for the rest of senior year. I said yes before she finished the question.
Cream cheese folded into the batter, past-prime strawberries macerated forty-five minutes. Here’s the cake.
Strawberry Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 1 hr 15 min | Total Time: 1 hr 35 min | Servings: 12
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and diced
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, divided
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
- 8 oz cream cheese, softened
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 3 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- Powdered sugar for dusting (optional)
Instructions
- Prepare the oven and pan. Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 9x5 loaf pan (or a 10-inch bundt pan). Set aside.
- Coat the strawberries. Toss the diced strawberries with 2 tablespoons of the measured flour in a small bowl until evenly coated. This keeps them from sinking to the bottom during baking. Set aside.
- Cream the butter and cream cheese. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and cream cheese together until light and fluffy, about 3–4 minutes. The cream cheese is what makes this pound cake exceptionally moist and tender.
- Add sugar and eggs. Gradually beat in the granulated sugar until pale and well combined. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla extract.
- Combine dry ingredients. Whisk together the remaining flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and stir just until a smooth batter forms—do not overmix.
- Fold in strawberries. Gently fold the flour-coated strawberries into the batter using a rubber spatula, distributing them evenly throughout.
- Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 70–80 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is deep golden brown. If the top browns too quickly, tent loosely with foil after the first 45 minutes.
- Cool before slicing. Let the cake cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar before serving if desired.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 320 | Protein: 5g | Fat: 15g | Carbs: 43g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 140mg