Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make a pound cake completely from scratch.
Traditional pound cakes have always been made using a pound of
butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, and a pound of eggs, so there's no
mystery as to how pound cakes originally got their name. While this is a great
starting point for a classic pound cake, over the years I've made a few
variations to make my all-time favorite pound cake recipe, and today I'm excited
to share that recipe with you. The first thing that you'll want to do for this
recipe is pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, we are going to
grab one pound or four sticks of unsalted butter. You want this to be a
little soft so I like to set mine out to soften close to room temperature about
thirty minutes to an hour before I actually begin making this pound cake.
What we're going to do is we will add this butter to the bowl of a stand mixer.
Now if you don't have a stand mixer you can certainly use an electric hand mixer
instead. You'll definitely want a large bowl because this pound cake recipe
makes a lot of batter, but I don't really recommend making this by hand. That's
because there's going to be a lot of stirring and creaming involved that's
really important to giving this pound cake the right texture. So if you have a
stand mixer definitely use it. Now we'll turn on our electric mixer beating the
butter until it's creamy and well combined. With our butter well creamed,
now we're going to add our sugar. This recipe calls for three and a half cups
of sugar. We'll add this to our bowl and we'll stir everything together again
until the butter and sugar are creamy and light and fluffy. What I like to do
is start with a mixer on a low speed and then gradually increase the speed so
that the butter and sugar get really well incorporated. I'm just gonna to
pause briefly here and I'll scrape down the sides and the bottom of this bowl
because, sometimes my stand mixer has a tendency to miss the sides and the bottom,
and we really want to make sure for this pound cake that all of our ingredients
are really well combined. We'll go ahead and give this another stir.
Now that we have our butter and our sugar taken care of let's move on to our
egg mixture. This recipe uses 6 large eggs and 6 large egg yolks. We are going
to add our eggs and your egg yolks together in a large bowl, and then we
will add a tablespoon of pure vanilla extract, and a teaspoon of salt. Now we
will use either a fork or a whisk to lightly beat together our egg mixture so
that all of the yolks are slightly scrambled, and the vanilla, and the salt
are well incorporated into the mixture. At this point you'll really be able to
smell your vanilla extract and it smells really good.
Alright now that we have our eggs lightly beaten and our mixture well
combined. we are going to add this to our butter and sugar mixture. What you'll
need to do is, we are going to turn our mixer on to a low stir setting and we
are going to very gradually pour this egg mixture into the batter. What you
want is a slow stream pouring into your batter, so that as it's being added into
the batter, it's being incorporated into the butter and sugar mixture. You don't
want to add everything at once. Once that's nicely incorporated we are
going to pause and we are going to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl.
Again, it's really important when you're making pound cake that your ingredients
are really well combined. Once you scrape the bowl, now we are
going to stir again, and we are going to gradually increase the mixer speed to
high, and we're going to let this beat on high speed for about 30 seconds to a
minute. If your batter is looking a little curdled at this point, don't worry
that's totally fine and that will go away as we add our flour mixture. Now you
do want to make sure that your eggs and your butter mixture are really well
combined before we proceed. My batter is looking pretty good at this point so
we're going to add our flour. Now for this recipe you can use either
all-purpose flour or cake flour. Whether you are using all-purpose or cake flour
for this recipe, you're going to use three and a half cups. We'll turn our
mixer to low speed and we will gradually add, about a quarter cup at a time, our
flour into our batter stirring until everything is well combined.
As I mentioned it's really important that your ingredients be well combined
for this pound cake recipe. So once our flour is
mostly combined, we're going to pause and we're going to scrape the sides and
bottom of the bowl again. Now we will stir this together again slowly
increasing the speed to medium-high and beating for about another 30 seconds or
until we are sure the ingredients are nicely combined.
This looks pretty good, so what we are going to do now is, we are going to need a 10-inch greased and
floured tube pan. You can use a bundt pan if you have one, just so long as the
sides are tall enough. As I mentioned, this makes a lot of batter and it will
rise some in the oven. You're going to want to make sure that you grease and
flour not only the sides and bottom of the tube pan but also that center ring.
This batter is really heavy and it is going to make us a nice dense cake. I
know that a lot of the cake recipes that I share are nice and soft and fluffy but
a good pound cake should be really dense and this one is going to be just that.
I'll use my spatula now to smooth out the surface. Your pound cake is going to
need to cook for about an hour and 15 minutes in your 350 degrees fahrenheit
oven. Tt is so important that you do not over bake this cake otherwise it will
come out dry. So if your oven runs hot you are going to want to either make
sure your oven is calibrated properly or start checking it sooner. A great way to
check if your pound cake is finished baking is to use a long wooden skewer.
A toothpick is obviously too short to cut it for this recipe. So I like to use
these skewers that are often used for shish kabobs, and you will insert this in
the thickest part of your pound cake, and if it comes out with a few moist crumbs
you know it's finished baking. It should not come out with any wet batter. If it
comes out clean it is also finished baking, but I like to pull it out a
couple minutes before that when you have a few moist crumbs on your skewer.
That way it can finish baking while it's cooling for the best possible pound cake.
Now you just want to let your pound cake cool completely before digging in.
Once it's ready now we can go ahead and cut in. Now this pound cake is great on its
own, but I also like to add whipped cream and berries to mine.
That is how you make my all-time favorite pound cake recipe. As I hope you
guys can see this is a nice dense buttery cake with a tight crumb. It is so
good served with or without toppings. I really hope you will try it out and
please let me know what you think. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time.