Peach Pound Cake

slice of peach pound cake in a pan crusted with some of the brandy glaze

A couple weeks ago, I served peach pound cake to the book club I'm in.  The Colorado peaches had been ripening for a couple days and were uber-fragrant, so I was really excited to cook them up into something delicious. The recipe called for 2 cups of diced peaches, but I loaded the cake up with almost double the suggested amount because I wanted to use up some of the peaches (and because more means yummier, right?).

I guess pound cake recipes usually call for a full cup of sour cream, but this one only required half that. I feel like the other half cup would have made the cake more moist the first day we ate it, but the next day the cake felt perfectly moist anyway.  But, since I was going to serve the cake just hours after it came out of the oven, I needed it be moist ASAP. So, Steve suggested I make a glaze. We tried one glaze unsuccessfully, but then he had the genius idea of a brandy glaze. Of course! Brandy and peaches are a match made in heaven!  We made it up on the fly, but the basic idea is to get a little bit of brandy (maybe a shot or two) and add a lot of sugar, then heat it up so that the sugar can dissolve. While we heated the mixture, I poked the pound cake full of teeny holes (inverse porcupine, essentially) so that the glaze would better permeate the dense cake.  Then, we slowly poured the glaze and watched in excitement as the sugary goodness seeped into the cake and dripped down its edges.  After the cake glaze cooled, it had a delicious, thin, sweet crust. Deeelightful!