After a long hiatus, Khana Korner is BACK! To make things fun, here’s something my wife made a few weeks ago. I know this edition is coming out during Ramadan, so if you can’t handle this during fasting, well, come back in a few weeks. But if you go ahead, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

During our trip to the Smoky Mountains, we had something called grilled cream cheese pound cake. It was quite delish. What they did was take a piece of very premium cream cheese based pound cake, literally grilled it, and voila, instant amazingness. There’s something about grilling up a piece of pound cake that truly transforms the soft and fluffy cake into a more packed and moist one with a nice crunchy caramelized shell. That something made me want her to make it herself.

So she did. All it took was some simple ingredients and a little improvising. She didn’t exactly have quick access to cream cheese based pound cake or a grill at the time, so check out what she did.

First some pound cake. You can see we got it plain and ol’ style from Jewel, a local grocer. Nothing fancy like the cream cheese based one we had in the Smoky Mountains, but this still worked great.

Followed by some fruit. Actually, lots of fruit since we made this for four people.  She chose strawberries because I like them. Cut them up, pour in a few spoons of sugar, then mix it up real nice and let it sit for a while. This gets all the “good juices” to come out and mix up with the sugar to make that luscious syrupy compote stuff.

Oh SNAP. There it is. Whipped Topping. Thawed, pre-whipped, and ready to go. I know you’re smiling now.

Griddle time! Turned it on, took a stick of butter and greased up the pan. Butter is key, one because it makes it taste amazing, and two, it’ll give you kitchen street cred for using it. Not even joking. I think next time we should just butter the pound cake itself. The pieces sat on each side until they were browned. Btw, they smelled amazing.

Take the grilled pound cake, add the strawberries, top with whipped topping, and there it is. Grilled pound cake with sugared strawberries and whipped cream. I apologize if you’re reading this while fasting, but tell me that doesn’t look like a mouthful of bliss.

What’s also nice is that you can always step it up if need be; meaning you can choose to go premium: premium bakery quality pound cake, more syrupy and compote-like fruit, and even legit and actually whipped cream (heavy cream and sugar whipped up like crazy). As for this one, it was the “quick and easy” nature that made this work, alhumdulillah. I’d definitely like to find me some “cream cheese pound cake” one day and go at this again, inshaAllah.

For a video version of this, check out my favorite cooking show’s rendition, Sam the Cooking Guy’s take on grilled pound cake.

RATING: 5 out of 5