Everything you need to know to make a gorgeous pound cake

June 19, 2024 5:27 AM

The BEST Pound Cake Recipe in the South is one way to go, and another is How pound cake became a Southern classic. You can dip back into history, or you can go the encyclopedic route. Perhaps you prefer Old-Fashioned Pound Cake, or The Best Pound Cake? The Vintage Recipe Project has you covered with the Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme Pound Cake. Note, also, that important pound cake research is happening in the 2020s.

Orange is one flavor that is not infrequently incorporated into pound cakes, as witness the Orange Creamsicle Pound Cake, the Orange Pound Cake, the Orange Cream Cheese Pound Cake, or Giada De Laurentiis' Toasted Pound Cake with Citrus Cream.

[This post brought to you by an unanticipated and intense longing for pound cake on a day that will probably feature no baked goods whatsoever.

.]

posted by cupcakeninja (21 comments total)

One of my earliest memories is of eating pound cake for breakfast with my mom when it was just turning light outside. It was Sara Lee, but even so, I still long for the feeling of that soft top "crust" on a good piece of pound cake.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:43 AM on June 19 [5 favorites]

If there's anyone looking to play with pound cake flavors, I have an unlikely source: a cookbook called Gateau. Yes, I know that that's a book of French baking instead of Southern baking; but this is about French home baking as opposed to the fancy patisserie stuff, and France has the pound cake as well (they call it the quatre-quart, which stands for "four fourths", and it's basically a pound cake under a different name because of the metric system).

The quatre-quart recipe is really basic - equal weights of eggs (in shell), sugar, butter, and flour, with whatever flavor you want. And Gateau has fifty-two suggestions for how to flavor that recipe - adding some apple, adding some basil, using mixed citrus zest, adding just one kind of citrus zest, adding instant coffee, adding fennel seeds and orange zest, adding chopped dates, adding dried cherries, adding some lavender, adding different spices like nutmeg or cinnamon, adding a spice blend like ras el hanout, splitting the cake in half after baking and slathering in some jam or lemon curd....

The cookbook is a little spendy, but it's likely at your local library and all the different flavorings are in one place so you could likely sneak in and copy just those few pages, and it would be easy enough to figure out how to adapt it to your own pound cake recipe (most of the flavorings riff on the basic initial recipe - "instead of the vanilla extract, use X amount of almond extract and Y amount of [whatever]").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:17 AM on June 19 [9 favorites]

This pound cake bit from humourist Jeanne Robertson never fails to make me laugh.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:28 AM on June 19 [6 favorites]

Huh. EmpressCallipygos, thank you for that. In particular, I cook various dishes with ras el hanout, but somehow I don't think I've ever considered using it in baking. That sounds like a nice level-up.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:29 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

Yeah, ras el hanout was new on me too. Their suggestion is to go with a teaspoon of vanilla extract (instead of two teaspoons for the main recipe), the zest of one orange, and two teaspoons of the ras plus a half teaspoon of cinnamon. They also suggest swapping out one of those two teaspoons for a teaspoon of instant espresso for yet another alternative.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:41 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

Canadian prices. Pound of unsalted butter - $5. 10 eggs - $3. Pound of flour - $1. Pound of sugar - 75c.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:08 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

No. The best pound cake was made by my grandmother who was feeding a family of farm boys. She made pound cakes without a written recipe. It can never be replicated because there was no recipe.The delightful crunchy crisp bits on the top edge were the perfect part.

(But I did learn to make biscuits from her - no recipe for those, either.....)
posted by mightshould at 7:11 AM on June 19 [4 favorites]

Now I want pound cake.
posted by Archer25 at 7:27 AM on June 19 [2 favorites]

I've had good luck with this lemon sour cream pound cake from Chenée Today. This isn't a purist's pound cake-- the sour cream and baking soda are heresies to some-- but it's a very good cake. I'm in the UK where cake flour isn't a thing, so her plain-flour-plus-cornstarch trick was really useful. At the bottom of the page are more Juneteenth recipes from Black food bloggers.

I also found this method helpful, from the New Best Recipe cookbook (America's Test Kitchen/Cook's illustrated):

The simplest, most straightforward method of making pound cake involves beating the butter and sugar to a fluffy cream, adding the eggs (whole) at one time, creaming the batter some more, and then mixing in the flour. No matter how we tried to work this method -- with and without liquid, beating the batter after putting in the flour (as some old cookbooks recommend) -- we got simply awful results. The cakes were rubber doorstops. [...]

Then we found a key to the answer in Flo Braker's The Simple Art of Perfect Baking (Morrow, 1985). Her classic pound cake is mixed in a way very similar to the above method except that instead of adding whole eggs one at a time to the creamed butter and sugar, she directs that the eggs first be lightly beaten in a bowl and then added by tablespoons to the butter mixture. Apparently, the butter and sugar mixture is incapable of absorbing whole eggs; the mixture "curdles" and all the air is let out, resulting in tough, shrunken, wet pound cakes. But dribbling in egg a little at a time preserves the emulsion-- Braker astutely compares the process to making mayonnaise-- and allows all the air to be retained, making for a light, soft, tender cake. In baking, everything is in the details.

Finally, I can never think of pound cake without thinking of this thread from comics author Gail Simone. Ah, romance!
posted by Pallas Athena at 7:47 AM on June 19 [5 favorites]

Shouldn't this be in a lively MetaTalk thread about transpalestinianmuskians? ..... Oh.
posted by sammyo at 8:05 AM on June 19

Need to remember this as I've thought of trying a pound cake, managed during covidtimes to make cookies successfully (actually the best was failed snickerdoodles, they somehow came out very thin and crispy and I totally freaked out until I tasted them, need to redo that failure) and do have an appropriate pan, maybe after the heatwave.
posted by sammyo at 8:09 AM on June 19

I absolutely love pound cake but don't have a reliable way to easily share a full bundt cake and even a loaf pan cake gets to be a lot to stock my small freezer with. So I had gone without making pound cakes or bundt cakes for awhile.

But the the internet pointed me to the Swedish Almond Cake which sounded delicious but I wasn't into having a dedicated pan for it. But at some point as I was comparing various recipes, someone mentioned the pan is half-bundt cake sized. SOLD.

Now I have confirmed that Swedish almond cake is delicious, and I can make pound cake in a manageable size. This is a small but delightful improvement in my life.
posted by EvaDestruction at 8:29 AM on June 19 [5 favorites]

I'm sceptical that flaxseed can replace eggs when the eggs are a quarter of the weight, (the aquafaba in the important pound cake research linked in the OP seems more likely to be successful) but a lemon and maple syrup pound cake sounds good. (It's called courgette and lemon, but I bet you don't really taste the courgette.)

In a definitely non-vegan direction, this buttermilk one served with clotted cream and booze-soaked fresh fruit is intriguing too.
posted by Shark Hat at 12:13 PM on June 19

Blanka Makes Pound Cake
posted by AlSweigart at 12:13 PM on June 19

Classic Pound
posted by Balna Watya at 12:27 PM on June 19 [1 favorite]

I was at the hardware store the other day, as I am every other day (old house) comparing prices on corrugated fiberglass or topsoil or shelving or plumbing adaptors, and realized they had baking tins that looked really sturdy so I picked one up and it was hefty, a good sign, and it's non-stick, that used to mean flimsy but coupled with hefty sturdy and cheap means it's time to replace the flimsy no-longer-non-stick that I've moved house with, oh, 7 times. Pound cake sounds like a good test drive, and if it's favorable I'll pick up a couple more tins since I'm there all the time anyway. C'mon over for some fresh fruit & cake & coffee!
posted by winesong at 3:02 PM on June 19 [3 favorites]

Momma's Lemon Pound Cake. Even cops love it.
posted by CCBC at 4:45 PM on June 19

Slightly off topic : I bought the Gateau cookbook but it irritated the shit out of me with its mishmash of measurements (I'll tell you that eggs are this many grams but I won't specify what size cup measurement I'm using, the French use a "yogurt container" but I'm not going to tell you what size that might be for the dozen or so non-French people in the world, and never ever use salted butter but let me tell you a page later about the salted butter that the French always use....) but that is more a reflection about my personality than any failing of the recipes, which I'm sure were great. I just wish I'd been able to make more than one without having a mental breakdown. Incidentally it was the quatre quatre recipe and it didn't turn out well despite three attempts (undercooked, overcooked and finally overcooked on the outside and still liquid in the centre). I normally don't fail this hard at baking so the crispy/soggy cake was the final straw and I returned the book in a fit of pique. Perhaps I should try again, after some therapy.
posted by ninazer0 at 8:19 PM on June 19

Southern Living, Million Dollar Pound Cake.

That’s all you need. Soak fresh strawberries in some sugar water with a splash of orange juice and serve over the top of a piece that’s still barely warm. Top with fresh whipped cream.
posted by pearlybob at 2:39 AM on June 20 [3 favorites]

I will confess that I bought Gateau yesterday and look forward to trying it out. Not going to be this weekend, with a looming heat wave, but def when cooler weather hits.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:01 AM on June 20

The r/Old_Recipes subreddit often gets worked into minor obsessions (at least one of which has led to the creation of a spinoff subreddit for an individual recipe). Right now the flavor du jour (and des past few months) is a cream cheese pound cake!
posted by the tartare yolk at 10:05 PM on June 20