Perfect Pound Cake

What is a Pound Cake?

Pound cake is one of those simple, classic desserts that is exactly right for almost every situation from a casual backyard cookouts to fancy dinner parties.

Pound Cake originated in northern Europe during the 18th century, and was aptly named because each of the cake's 4 ingredients - flour, butter, eggs, and sugar - weighed in at a pound each.

This made for a fairly large cake. Today's pound cakes tend to be smaller in size (and weight), and may contain a few other ingredients, while (mostly) maintaining that 1:1:1:1 weight ratio between the flour, butter, eggs, and sugar.

How to Make a Perfect Pound Cake

There are three keys to making a pound cake with a soft, velvety texture, that's dense and buttery but not heavy:

1. The reverse creaming method
2. A touch of baking powder
3. Cake flour

What is the reverse creaming method?

Many cake recipes, including my all-time favorite Vanilla Cake recipe, use a traditional creaming method. With traditional creaming, you start by beating the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until the mixture is light and fluffy.

This causes the sugar crystals to cut through the butter, creating lots of tiny air bubbles that get trapped inside the fat molecules. As the cake bakes, those trapped air bubbles expand, creating a light and fluffy cake.

With reverse creaming, you beat the sugar, butter, AND flour together before adding any of the liquid ingredients. This coats the flour molecules with fat, creating a barrier that slows down the formation of gluten.

Gluten is what gives baked goods structure. If you're baking something like homemade bread you want a strong gluten structure so that the bread has a tight, chewy texture.

But for cake baking, the goal is to combine the ingredients in a way that creates a weak gluten structure, so that the cake has a soft and tender crumb.

Both traditional creaming and reverse creaming will succeed in inhibiting gluten formation. But, the reverse creaming method is more effective in creating the fine, velvety texture that is essential to a really great pound cake.

Does pound cake need baking powder?

Most traditional pound cake recipes rely entirely on eggs to leaven the cake - the "rise" that happens while a cake bakes. And while it's possible to get a soft, tender cake without using any baking powder, it's just as likely that you'll end up with a cake that's dense and grainy. Why take the risk?

In this recipe, I found that just 1 teaspoon of baking powder lightened the texture and insured a good rise while maintaining the dense, rich crumb of a great pound cake.

Why does this recipe call for cake flour?

As we talked about earlier, a weak gluten structure is essential for baking soft, tender cakes. The reverse creaming method does a lot to weaken the gluten structure in pound cake, but there is one more thing we can do to control the amount of gluten in our cake - use a low protein flour.

Cake flour is made from low protein, soft wheat. It is also chlorinated, which makes the flour slightly acidic, weakening the gluten even more.

Chlorination also changes the starch molecules in the flour, allowing them to absorb more liquid and bind better with the fat in the batter. All that results in a cake with a finer, more tender crumb.

Most of the time it's best to just purchase cake flour. But, in a pinch, you can use a combination of flour and cornstarch to create something that's somewhat equivalent to cake flour.

Cake Flour Substitution: For each cup of cake flour in a recipe, remove 2 tablespoons of flour and replace it with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. Substituting cornstarch for some of the flour will lower the protein content, but not achieve exactly the same results as cake flour since all-purpose flour is not chlorinated.

Extra Egg Yolks are the Secret to Rich and Flavorful Pound Cake

Eggs are one of the most important ingredients in cake recipes because they contribute structure. Proteins in both egg whites and egg yolks coagulate as the cake bakes adding structure to the cake crumb. Without this structure, the cake would just fall apart as soon as you removed it from the pan.

In addition to contributing protein, egg yolks also add fat, flavor, and emulsifying lecithin. Since emulsifiers hold fat and water together, adding extra egg yolks allows the batter to hold more liquid.

That extra liquid, holds more sugar, creating a moister, sweeter, more flavorful cake.

This Is a Mostly Butter Recipe

This recipe is an almost-but-not-quite all-butter pound cake. It contains 16 tablespoons of butter plus 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.

Adding vegetable oil is a very untraditional way to bake a pound cake, but it's hard to argue with results. Oil is wonderful in cakes. When compared to butter, cakes baked with oil are loftier, have a more even crumb and stay moist and fresh tasting longer.

Butter, on the other hand, contributes flavor and a more dense, sturdy texture. For this recipe, I wanted the best of both.

After trying several different ratios of butter and oil, I found that by replacing just 2 tablespoons of the butter with oil, the cake had a more even crumb, was exceptionally moist, and stayed fresh longer. And, since most of the fat in this recipe is butter, we haven't sacrificed the cake's flavor or structure.

What to Serve with Pound Cake

Pound cake can be served plain, glazed, dusted with powdered sugar, with whipped cream or ice cream, or smothered with butterscotch sauce, whisky sauce, salted caramel, hot fudge sauce, or chocolate ganache.

But my favorite way to eat pound cake is topped with spoonfuls of Maple Brown Butter Roasted Fruit or Cherry Sauce.

Maple Brown Butter Roasted Fruit: Roasting fruit concentrates the natural sugars, intensifying the flavor and sweetness, and softening it up. Add all that to a brown butter maple sauce and you've got the kind of thing dreams are made of.

Cherry Sauce: I make this sauce with fresh cherries all summer long, spooning it over ice cream, cakes, pancakes, waffles, scones, and biscuits. But, you can also use frozen cherries to make it any time of year.

Even better, the sauce requires little more than adding all the ingredients to a saucepan and cooking until it's the consistency of maple syrup.

What Size Loaf Pan Should You Use for this Pound Cake Recipe?

This recipe makes enough batter to fill a standard 9-inch loaf pan. If you use a decorative loaf pan, like the Jubilee Loaf Pan I used for these photos, you might have some batter left over. Most decorated loaf pans don't have quite as much capacity as a standard 9-inch pan.

Whatever size pan you have, fill it no more than ¾ full. If you have batter left over, it means your pan isn't quite the same capacity as a standard loaf pan which will reduce the bake time for your cake.

To ensure a perfectly baked pound cake, check the cake after 55 minutes of baking and then continue to bake, checking it every 5 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.

When done, the top of the cake will appear "set" and it will be pulling away from the sides of the pan ever so slightly.

Leftover batter can be baked into cupcakes. Bake them at 350 degrees for approximately 45 minutes. The baker's treat.

How to Keep Pound Cake From Sticking to the Pan

If you're using a decorative pan with a non-stick coating, spraying it with non-stick baking spray should be enough to keep the cake from sticking. This is good news, because greasing and flouring all those nooks and crannies is a pain in the you-know-what. 

Having said that, if you're using a pan that doesn't have a non-stick coating, or if the non-stick coating has worn off a bit, you'll want to grease and flour the pan. Here's how to do that.

If using a standard loaf pan rather than a decorative one, I advise you to also grease and flour the pan - even if it has a non-stick coating. The long, flat surfaces of a standard pan can cause some of the cake to stick to the bottom. It's not 100% necessary, but skipping this step isn't worth the risk.

More Loaf Cake and Single Layer Cake Recipes:

• Lemon Berry Snack Cake
• Pistachio Cardamom Cake
• Almond Plum Cake
• Irish Apple Cake with Custard Sauce
• Best Vanilla Loaf Cake with 4 Flavor Variations
• Lemon Olive Oil Loaf Cake
• Chocolate Brownie Loaf Cake

Pound Cake is a Building Block Recipe

Building block recipes are tried-and-true recipes that I consider foundational to great home baking. They are the kind of recipes I come back to over and over again, sometimes baking them as is, but often using them as a jumping off point to create something new. > Scroll through all Building Block recipes.

If you give this recipe a try, let me know! Leave a comment, rate it, or take a picture and tag it #ofbatteranddough on Instagram.

Happy baking!