Perfect Pound Cake

By CheeseDiva

Tips for Baking a Perfect Pound Cake
Nothing beats the rich, buttery flavor of a homemade pound cake. Learn to bake pound cakes like a pro with these tips and tricks.
• Print | Email | Add Comment | Comments (3)

One of our favorite pound cake recipes–Buttermilk Pound Cake with Custard Sauce
Photo: Jennifer Davick
Click to Enlarge

6 Perfect Pound Cakes 
Give your go-to pound cake recipe a breather and try one of these pound cake recipes from scratch. more
Originally made with a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour, creative cooks have, over time, come up with countless variations, such as replacing a portion of the butter with cream cheese or a few of the eggs with sour cream and leavening.
The most extraordinary thing about these pound cakes is how easy they are to prepare. You can bake them days ahead of time and store them in the pantry, or place them in large zip-top freezer bags and store in the freezer for up to two months.
Pound Cake Tips from the Pros
• Prep before you start. Carefully read through the entire recipe, and prepare any special ingredients, such as chopped fruits or toasted nuts, before starting to mix the batter. We like to pre-measure our ingredients and assemble them in the order listed. That way, if interrupted, we‘re less likely to make a mistake.
• Use name-brand ingredients. Store brands of sugar are often more finely ground than name brands, yielding more sugar per cup, which can cause the cake to fall. Store brands of butter may contain more liquid fat or flours more hard wheat, making the cake heavy.
• Be accurate. Measure your ingedients carefully. Extra sugar or leavening causes a cake to fall; extra flour makes it dry. Also, use an oven thermometer to check your oven's temperature for accuracy.
• Have ingredients at room temperature. This results in a pound cake with maximum volume.
• Be patient. Beat softened butter (and cream cheese or vegetable shortening) at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. This can take from 1 to 7 minutes, depending on the power of your mixer. Gradually add sugar, continuing to beat until light and fluffy. These steps are so important because they whip air into the cake batter so it will rise during baking. When baking, place the cake pan in the center of the oven, and keep the door closed until the minimum baking time has elapsed. If the cake requires more baking, gently close the oven door as soon as possible after testing to prevent jarring and loss of heat—both can cause a cake to fall if it’s not completely done.
• Don't overbeat. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating just until the yellow disappears. Overbeating the eggs may cause the batter to overflow the sides of the pan when baked or create a fragile crust that crumbles and separates from the cake as it cools.
• Prep your cake pan. Grease cake pans with solid vegetable shortening, such as Crisco, and always dust with flour.
Test for doneness. Insert a long wooden pick into the center of the cake. It should come out clean, with no batter clinging to it.

Ingredients

• 3 cups cake flour
• 6 large eggs
• 1 pound butter
• 1 pound sugar
• 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
-sub 1 tsp. ea. Vanilla and almond extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
-sub sweetened condensed milk
• 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. I use a large spoon for this. Next I 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. I 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.