Pounded by egg prices

Here in the South, pound cake is ubiquitous and essential, the centerpiece at luncheons and receptions of every flavor. In Black communities like Daise’s, pound cakes are particularly revered. You’ll find pound cakes featured in prominent Black cookbooks, including the groundbreaking Vibration Cooking, or Travel Notes from a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, in which she credits her pound cake with earning her a marriage proposal from a “fine fly young man.”

More than half a century later, Ashley Frederick of Arlington, Texas founded a Black Peoples Pound Cakes community on Facebook. The group now has 636,643 members who post some 1,200 photos of their pound cakes each month. 

“In Gullah Geechee communities, people expect pound cakes at picnics, at funeral repasts, at church functions. If there’s a family celebration, there’s always a pound cake. If there are refreshments at an event, there will be a pound cake,” affirms Daise, a native of St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

Pound cake’s popularity means market opportunity for entrepreneurs like Daise, former chairman of the federal Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, and one-time host of the Nick Jr. television show, “Gullah, Gullah Island.” While Daise relies heavily on social media to promote Mr. Ron’s Gullahlicious Cakes, an untold number of Black home bakers pin their business cards to community bulletin boards all over the rural South. 

“I’d always been our family’s baker,” says Daise, who gave his pound cakes as Christmas gifts to the show’s producers. When the show ended, his wife Natalie, an artist, suggested he start selling his cakes at a St. Helena sandwich shop.

“It was soon after Destiny’s Child came out with ‘Bootylicious,’ so that’s where my business name came from,” he laughs.

Local sales were strong. But after Daise began commuting to Brookgreen Gardens, three hours away, to head up the cultural institution’s creative education department, baking on the weekends became too taxing. He paused his pounds.

Now retired from Brookgreen, Mr. Ron has returned to his Gullahlicious ways, selling eight varieties of pound cakes on Etsy, including the traditional “Family Favorite,” an all-chocolate “Sea Island Serenade,” and his latest innovation, a “Cinnamon Swirl” pound cake. 

“People started ordering, and ordering, and ordering,” says Daise, who, on a good day, was selling 30 cakes a day a few years ago, when Daise priced his whole cakes at $45.

Today, with eggs costing 350% more than this time last year, Daise has raised cake prices to $55 for a whole cake and has begun offering half-cakes for 30 bucks. Sales, he reports, have slipped. On average, he’s shipping around 10 cakes a week, although the situation improves somewhat during the holidays.

Daise attributes the slowdown to “rising inflation worries and fears of tariffs—it’s not just eggs, it’s everything,” he adds. “My cakes are not an essential, so I understand, but my sales are drastically lower.”

In Beaufort, South Carolina, Anita Singleton Prather and her cousin Larry Singleton, have been baking and selling pound cakes for years, using the recipe handed down from their grandmothers, who were sisters (Singleton’s grandmother had been the cook at Tidalholm, the Beaufort guest house featured in “The Big Chill”, and “The Great Santini”.) 

After Prather’s mother retired from teaching school, she started a cake and catering business out of her garage, “and it just grew from there,” Prather says. Her daughter, Leslie Prather, remembers sifting flour for her grandmother when she was 5 years old; she’s now the owner of Gullah Gal Cakes & Tings. 

“Leslie brought by a new one by last week, a sweet potato pound cake with cream cheese frosting. She took my signature recipe and bumped it up a notch—not sure if she put a big toe in it or what, but Lawd…,” Prather says in satisfied wonderment.

Still, Prather gives her cousin the nod for best baker. “We ain’t competitive when Larry’s baking,” she says. 

Like Daise, Singleton has also raised his prices. “A pound cake used to be $25 or $30, and now I’m charging $55 for a plain pound cake,” he says. But business remains steady. “My customers are still calling me,” he says. “I’m baking a lot for the church, and I’ve got two regular customers in Atlanta who drive all the way here to pick their pound cakes up.”

“People still want good-tasting home cooking,” Prather says. “They still want that one thing they can indulge in. And they’re willing to pay for it.” 

The price of traditional or Sweet Potato Pie pound cake from Gullah Gal Cakes & Tings is higher too. To keep its price from rising further, Leslie Prather sources eggs from the nearby Air Force commissary, when possible, or from a friend who has chickens.

“But my friend also has seven kids, so she needs them,” says Leslie Prather, who’s experimenting with developing a vegan pound cake, which will solve the egg problem. Meanwhile, her uncle will sub in duck eggs when he can get them. 

Creativity is called for as ingredient costs for the beloved pound cake remain high. But this is far from the first time in the pound cake’s long history as an American classic that economics have been challenging.

As Edna Lewis says in The Taste of Country Cooking, pound cake maestros like Singleton and Daise will always find a way to adapt and put their own signature on a cake. After all, as Lewis assures us, pound cakes “are built to endure.”  

Stephanie Hunt is a Charleston-based writer who pens features, profiles and travel stories for numerous publications, including Veranda, Southern Living, Washington Post, Garden & Gun, and Charleston Magazine, where she is editor at large.