Pound Cake

Pound cake. A recipe so easy that a written version did not show up until 1847 (Good Eats, Season 13, A Pound of Cake).

Ingredients:

One pound of each of the following: room temperature butter, sugar, eggs, flour, eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon (Kosher) salt

Directions:

You’re going to want to let the butter sit out for a couple hours until it reaches around 65 degrees F. Divide up the butter and place it onto of the sugar, this will keep the sugar from going everywhere. Cream the butter and sugar together on medium for five minutes. Oh and a side note. I strongly recommend Alton Brown’s recommendation that you use slow churn or European style butter. I used butter that I bought from my local farmer’s market.

Once you have your nice fluffy butter and sugar mixture work in your pound of eggs. For regular market variety large chicken eggs you will use about nine. Because I once again used food from my farmer’s market it took me 11 eggs to get a pound. Either way you are going to want to work in your eggs one at a time and do not drop another egg in until there are no signs left of the pervious egg. If you don’t do this your batter will break. Now add your vanilla and salt.

Finally it is time to work in the flour. Did I mention you need to use cake flour? Well you do. Using cake flour will cause your cake to be less chewy and cake flour will integrate faster into your batter. Keep the speed on low and work in installments; preferably three. Keeping your flour in a plastic cup or on a paper plate will help you get it into the bowl easier.

Once all the flour is in stop the mixer, scrap down the sides, and then beat on medium for 30 second.

Now get out your food scale!! Place the loaf pan……oh wait. I need to tell you about the loaf pan. Let’s back up a minute then. This recipe is for two loaf pans. You’re going to want to butter and flour these loaf pans. Now, where were we, oh yeah. Place the loaf pan on your food scale and if it is super cool it will have a “tear” button. This will subtract the weight of the pan. Now, pour batter into the pan until it hits two pounds. The rest goes in the other pan! Hooray!!

Now into a 350 degree F oven for about an hour until the inside of the cake reads 210 degree F on your handy dandy probe thermometer. Take the cakes out and place them, still in the pans, on a cooling rack for 10 minutes before depaning. After depaning let it rest on the cooling rack for another 10 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

The batter gets really fluffy looking!

Two pounds in each pan please!

Yum.

---Dare to Cook---