StumbleUpon showed me a recipe from Martha Stewart’s “Everyday Food” magazine (it’s a magazine? right?) the other day. It was for pound cake. I had been meaning to make a pound cake, because I have this fancy cake pan that only likes to make pound cake, and I never make any, so if I don’t start using it on a regular basis I’ll find it difficult to justify keeping it because it takes up rather a large area of our cupboard, being a whole gigantic bundt cake shaped like a house, or really a whole street lined with houses, if they made residential streets in a round orientation with a hole in the middle which I’m not sure they do but they should give it a shot because as you can see, it would be adorable.
So pound cake.
The StumbleUpon recipe was followed by comments about how this is “the best pound cake ever,” and “I’ll never use another pound cake recipe as long as I live,” and “this pound cake brought my husband back from the dead” (why yes, I am writing these from memory). I don’t even have a favorite pound cake recipe of my own, so I thought, what if this is it? What if it’s coming to find me? What if this cake is part of my destiny?
Yeah, so anyway, I tried it, and it was a good pound cake. Dense and sweet, like they tend to be. Easy, too. I guess it’s my favorite one now, so… destiny achieved? Density achieved, at the very least. Recipe below.
Makes two 8.5″ x 4.5″ x 2.5″ loaves or one standard bundt cake
- 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1 bar (8 ounces) cream cheese, room temperature
- 3 cups sugar
- 6 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons salt
- Nonstick cooking spray
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. With an electric mixer, beat butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add sugar; beat until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in vanilla. With mixer on low, add flour and salt in two additions, beating until just combined.
- Generously coat pan(s) with cooking spray; immediately pour in batter (pan will seem full). Tap pans on work surface to eliminate any large air bubbles.
- Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out almost clean, 60 to 75 minutes for loaves, 90 minutes for a bundt. (If the tops begin to brown too quickly, tent with aluminum foi.l
- Cool 10 minutes in the pan. Turn out the cakes; cool completely, with top sides up, on a wire rack.
