{"id":179,"date":"2009-03-02T02:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T02:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=179"},"modified":"2021-09-08T12:10:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T19:10:29","slug":"pound-cake-one-pound-each-of-butter-sugar-flour-and-eggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/02\/pound-cake-one-pound-each-of-butter-sugar-flour-and-eggs\/","title":{"rendered":"Pound Cake: One Pound Each of Butter, Sugar, Flour and Eggs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pound<\/a><\/p>\n

I enjoy a couple of slices of pound<\/span> cake<\/span> and milk as a late night dessert, but have difficulty finding pound<\/span> cake<\/span> that meets my standards. Forget the “loaf cakes” made by the big commercial bakeries: they’re not bad, but they’re not what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n

\"ring<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m talking about ring pound cakes. My neighbors made a dense, dry pound cake around Christmastime that was very good, but my favorites growing up were cakes you could get from Ingles: ring-shaped, light-textured, with a fluffy yellow center wrapped in a dark brown crust.<\/p>\n

Usually there’s only one store in any given region that makes these, the others sticking to loaf cakes. As I moved from Greenville, South Carolina, I found Kroger in Atlanta and later Safeway in San Jose had cakes that were similar, with slight variations in density and crust.<\/p>\n

But there’s something wrong in our modern commercial paradise: in the pursuit of the dollar or fashion businessmen tweak their good products until they become crappy and then discontinue them. I’m sure that’s happened to all of you; and sure enough it happened to my pound cake.<\/p>\n

First, Safeway started selling them only as half rings. Then they cut back on quantity. Then they replaced them entirely with “vanilla loafs” pre-cut entirely too thin. Whole Foods had decent-flavored loaf cakes, but they too have started pre-slicing them and cutting back on quantity.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what people have against pound cakes, but I can’t find them locally baked, not even at bakeries – only icing-covered disasters, pudding cakes, and other variants, or alternatively Entenman’s not-bad-but-not-good-enough butter loaves.<\/p>\n

So, I am working on a pound<\/span> cake<\/span> recipe.<\/p>\n

I made my first pound cake years ago, back in Atlanta. I was using the approximate “one pound” recipe: a pound of sugar, eggs, butter and flour. I didn’t have a motorized mixer, and the hand mixing and stirring didn’t cut it. It’s fair to say this was a total FAIL. The flavor and crust were good, but the texture was dense as a brick and it was too hard to eat.<\/p>\n

More recently, I tried again. I had planned to try this with sugar first, then introduce Splenda on the next cake, but dumb me forgot to buy sugar thinking we had some, which I discovered halfway through prepping the recipe. I adapted the recipe primarily from “Butter Sugar Flour Eggs<\/a>” with a little help from the 1997 “Joy of Cooking”<\/a>:<\/p>\n