Heavenly Cake Bakers: Mini Vanilla Bean Pound Cakes

I couldn't take it any more, Brooklyn. I've escaped to Truro. 

And, since I found some mini loaf pans at a tag sale (where I was also able to pick up some farm-fresh eggs), I decided there was no reason to mess around with this week's Heavenly Cake, a basic vanilla pound cake. 

The cakes were not, sadly, vanilla bean pound cakes, as my Ugandan vanilla beans were left behind, but they were sweet and vanilla-tasting all the same. I baked the little loaves in the wall oven at the house my uncle and my parents are renting, a small octagonal building with space saving arrangements worthy of a hobbit hole.  I've never seen so clean an oven door in a place where the oven is clearly in use. The eggs were not the aforementioned farm fresh ones, but were products of my aunt and uncle's beloved hens, which they had schlepped from New Hampshire.

That's my father in the background with the paper. My mother was unsatisfied with my original photo shoot, taken indoors, and marched the cake board outside to capture the full beauty of the light and the trees.

The cake was supposed to be soaked in a vanilla cognac syrup, but we spread it with leftover chocolate buttercream instead, and that did just fine.