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.
