Awesome Pound Cake

By jdwooten

This a wonderful rich cake, it is named for the pound of sugar and the pound of butter it contains.

Ingredients

• 3 cups cake flour
• 6 large eggs
• 1 pound butter
• 1 pound sugar
• 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Preparation

Step 1

Sift the flour, baking soda,and baking powder into a large mixing bowl. Stir in salt and the sugar. Next add the butter. My grandmother would melt the butter in a pan over slow heat to make it blend easier. You can do this or just let the butter soften at
room temperature.

Add the eggs, whole. At this
point I break out my mixer and begin mixing on slow. Slowly add my buttermilk, and then the
vanilla extract. After it is thoroughly stirred,I turn the mixer up to medium for a few minutes,and then finally on high. If the mixture is a little thick I add just a touch more buttermilk. If you don't mix things thoroughly you will have lumps that will form air bubbles in your mixture and leave holes in your finished cake. It was always a matter of pride
not to have these air pocket holes in our cakes so we always made sure we got all of the lumps. In the pre-electric-mixer day that involved a lot of whipping the cake by hand. We usually didn't have a hand cranked
mixer that worked well, so this involved a large mixing spoon
to whip it. Some old timers even counted the number of times they whipped the mixture - sort of made it
fun and you didn't notice your arm tiring.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Take your standard tube cake pan and oil it with butter. Then lightly flour the oiled pan. Shake the excess flour from the pan.

Pour the mix in, bake the cake for about 1 hour and twenty minutes. Keep looking at how your cake is doing through the oven door but avoid opening
the door too much while it is cooking as I have seen this, or jarring a cake, cause it to collapse. When you think it is done, do the toothpick test. Stick a wooden toothpick into one of the thickest parts of the cake. If it's dry when you pull it our,
the cake is done.

Allow the cake to cool 15 or 20 minutes in the pan. Then gently remove it, and stick it on your favorite
decorative cake plate.