National Pound Cake Day!

Pound cake is a cake that uses a pound of each of its ingredients hence the name Pound Cake.  The original recipe consists of a pound of each of flour, butter, eggs, and sugar.  They are generally baked in a loaf pan or Bundt pan and normally served with dusted powdered sugar.

The pound cake was believed to originate in Northern Europe in the 1700s.  Over the years, the recipe for pound cake had some variation.  My favorite pound cake is the lemon pound cake which includes the juice of two or three large lemons changing the flavor and texture of the cake.  There are numerous variations of the traditional pound cake depending on certain countries and regions having distinctive styles, some including dried fruits.

Today, celebrate this day by making some pound cake or buy some ready-made one at your local groceries and serve it with some strawberry and whipped cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream to enjoy as a dessert after dinner.  Share on social media some recipe using #PoundCakeDay.

1966 John Lennon sparks his first major controversy

In England, no one took much notice of the John Lennon quotation that later set off a media frenzy in America. Chalk it up to a fundamental difference in religious outlook between Britain and America, or to a fundamental difference in sense of humor. Whatever the reason, it was only after the American press got hold of his words some five months later that the John Lennon comment that first appeared in the London Evening Standard on March 4, 1966, erupted into the “Bigger than Jesus” scandal that brought a semi-official end to the giddy phenomenon known as Beatlemania.

In their original context, Lennon’s remarks were clearly meant not as a boast, but as a sardonic commentary on the waning importance of religion. “Christianity will go,” Lennon said. “It will vanish and shrink….We’re more popular than Jesus now.” It was only one comment in an interview that covered such wide-ranging topics as gorilla suits and car phones, but it was this comment alone that made its way into the American teenybopper magazine DATEbook several months later, boiled down to the straight line, “We’re more popular than Jesus.”

(excerpted from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-lennon-sparks-his-first-major-controversy