The pound cake specialist

Durham doctor applies a physician's efficiency to his baking

DURHAM -- Dr. Kenneth W. Lyles approaches baking with a physician's precision.

He boasts of going "skin-to-skin" (a surgeon's term best not contemplated over breakfast) in record time when preparing his signature desserts. Ingredients must be laid out just so, the finished cake sliced first across then lengthwise.

Asked if he might be a tad obsessive-compulsive, Lyles looks dead serious for a minute and admits, "Oh, it's severe."

Then he lets loose with a laugh that oscillates somewhere between a high-pitched whoop and a cackle.

Lyles, 58, leads a double life. By profession, he is a doctor with positions at three local medical institutions -- professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center, staff physician at the VA Medical Center and clinical coordinator at the Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence in Cary. A geriatric specialist, he focuses on bone diseases such as osteoporosis and Paget's.

"I take care of and do research on bent, broken old people" is the way Lyles puts it.

But in his leisure time, especially during NASCAR races and Duke basketball games, the good doctor is a cake baker. And not just any cake; he specializes in pound cakes. His all-time high for a year was the 282 he baked in 2005. (Yes, he keeps a log.) Last year, he made 194. And he gives them all away -- to colleagues, friends, even some patients.

Lyles is eccentric in several ways. He likes to drive his Volvo fast, in imitation of his favorite NASCAR drivers. (He once rented the Orange County Speedway for a day so he could really open up the throttle on a friend's race car. He came within 0.39 seconds of qualifying for a race on that track.) He wears a pastel madras plaid fisherman's hat to meetings. He has a teacher's way of punctuating sentences with phrases like "Do you understand?" and "Is that clear?" He makes nickel or dollar bets at the drop of a hat. And then there's that laugh.

But of all his eccentricities, none is appreciated so much -- encouraged, even -- by his colleagues as his pound cake obsession. That's because in the 15 years he has been baking them, he has become very good at it.

Although he has experimented with several different flavors, his standard is a recipe he calls Mrs. Hill's Pound Cake -- a plain vanilla cake with a hint of lemon. The crust is perfectly golden brown, and the cake dense and evenly textured.

"They're about the best cakes I've ever tasted," says Andrew Silver, a colleague at the Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence. "When I was not on a low-carb diet, which I am now, one of the first things I would do is to check the place where he would leave them to see if they were there."

A way to say thanks

The cakes even inspired Vicki Maleck, a nurse at the Carolinas Center, to compose this poem:

Dr. Lyles' creations of the cake named pound

Are so extralicious no words can expound.

I look forward to tasting every crumb to be found.

When he delivers his next, I'll be sure to be around.

"It's my way of saying thank you to people," says Lyles, who passes out pound cakes at meetings of the geriatric physician fellowship program he directs, to the nursing staff for various studies and to research technicians in drug trials.

Are his pound cakes also a subtle form of bribery?

"He once told me, 'Sometimes a nice smile isn't enough,' " says junior colleague Heather Whitson, a geriatric physician at Duke. She notes that Lyles has many teaching awards, which she jokingly attributes to his cakes.

But when she needed a favor from Duke's Institutional Review Board, she knew whom to call.