Pound Cake

Last night I made a pound cake. I'd never made a pound cake before. It was interesting.

Useless trivia: A pound cake is called a pound cake because originally, the recipe called for a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour.

Why was it interesting? Well, this is a blog. If you don't want to know WHY it was interesting, you're going to have to stop reading now.

When you make a pound cake, you beat and beat and beat the wet ingredients. You beat the room-temperature butter until it's light and fluffy. Then you add the sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, beating and beating and beating the batter all the time. When the sugar is all in, it's extremely light and fluffy. Then you add vanilla and then eggs, one at a time, beating a full minute after each egg addition. By the time I was done with that, the mixture had the texture of that white fluffy frosting you get on store-bought wedding sheet cakes.

After that, you stir in the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, and any spices you might want) until it's just barely moistened. The resulting cake batter is light and airy and NOT pourable at all. I basically had to spread the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Then you bake it for a full hour at a lower temperature than most cakes.

I've made lots of cakes, boxed and from scratch, but I've never made one QUITE like the pound cake.

The result was *burp* delicious! A rich, buttery, flavorful, dense pound cake.

Great. Now I'm craving another piece!