About EPC & Me
Welcome to Ezra Pound Cake – the food blog, recipe collection and kitchen confessional of Rebecca Crump.
My name is Rebecca Crump, and I’m a freelance writer, baker and booty-shaker. I live in Nashville with my husband Jeff, a dreamy tech-junkie who owns an absurd number of jackets, and the two Henrys: his cat and my French bulldog. The pets were named before we started dating, and neither will give up the name. I see a lawsuit in our future.
I didn’t start out as a baker. I graduated with a degree in English and spent about 10 years working as a writer – in public relations, marketing, advertising and as executive editor of two regional newspapers. I even wrote horoscopes.
Sometimes I felt like what I was doing mattered. Sometimes I didn’t. I hated that. So, I started thinking about other things I might like to do. I liked to wake up early on the weekends to watch Food TV. I liked to read cookbooks. I loved to try new recipes and learn different techniques. When I saw Martha Stewart making those robin’s egg cupcakes on Oprah, I sketched cupcake designs for hours. I must have read Warren Brown’s career-change story 1,000 times. Obviously, cooking was my passion. I just didn’t know how to make the career change happen.
One afternoon, I was checking out the Classifieds and saw an ad for a new bakery. The owner was taking applications and interviewing people that day. For the next hour. I grabbed my jacket and drove over there, hoping they wouldn’t laugh at me. The owner quickly surmised I wasn’t a serial killer and offered to train me to be the bakery’s head pastry chef.
For several years, I woke up at 3 a.m. to refill the bakery’s cases with fresh pastries, cakes and other desserts by 7:30 a.m. Most of the people I worked with were German, and they were delightfully candid about my early efforts. I would get home from a 19-hour day and have to crawl from room to room, because my feet were just big, swollen, tortured bricks of flesh and pain. But I was not going to get schooled by an apple strudel. I toughened up, mastered the recipes and felt like what I was doing mattered. Then I moved on, like Bill Bixby at the end of “The Incredible Hulk.”
Why Ezra Pound Cake?
I started Ezra Pound Cake in March 2008, three months after I left the bakery to move to Nashville and start a new life with Jeff.
“Ezra Pound Cake” is a “Wheel of Fortune”-style “Before & After” phrase, like “Toby Keith Urban” or “Whitney Houston Texas.” It combines Ezra Pound, the Modernist poet, and Pound Cake, a simple-but-delicious dessert containing an abundance of butter and sugar. So, it’s a three-word phrase that spells out my own “before” and “after” as a writer-turned-baker. Because now, I use my master’s in English strictly to come up with badass blog names. My mom is SO PROUD.
This site is dedicated to sharing recipes, celebrating my spectacular kitchen triumphs (and disasters) and promoting the fun to be had cooking at home.
Contact
rebecca@ezrapoundcake.com