How to Make Pound Cake

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making an easy, delicious pound cake. So let's get started. First off, set your oven to 350 so it's nice and hot. And now, in a large bowl, we're gonna combine the dry ingredients, starting with one and a half cups, or 180 grams, of all-purpose flour. Half a teaspoon of salt, for some contrast, and half a teaspoon of baking powder to puff things up. Originally, pound cake was a pound of flour, a pound of eggs, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar. I was curious about it, so I tried making it a long time ago. Did not enjoy it very much. Modern variations of the recipe have that pleasantly dense, perfectly sweet character still, but it tastes much better than just a pound of each. Pound cake might just be the perfect snacking cake. I love having it as a grab-and-go snack. Have a little piece of my coffee in the afternoon, and it's just about perfection. But it is so good in a number of other recipes, too. Slices of pound cake form the base if you're making a baked Alaska. Delicious, mound of ice cream on top with some meringue that's toasted, it's lovely. Or, cut it up into cubes, soak it with delicious things, and have that mounded over for trifle. Or, you can make a version of strawberry shortcake with this, too. So many choices. I hope you get a chance to make this, and master all the variations. Grab a whisk, mix it up so it's nice and distributed. In the 18th century, many people were illiterate, so it helps to have a very easy recipe. Set your bowl aside, and now it's time to grab your stand mixer, fade it with the whisk attachment, or a big bowl if you're using a hand mixer. For this recipe, you'll need half a cup, or one stick, 113 grams, of unsalted, room-temperature butter so it's nice and soft, but not melty. Feel free to microwave your butter at half power in 10-second bursts if it's a little stiff. We're gonna beat this for two minutes at medium speed until it is nice and creamy. In the meantime, we can prep our loaf pan. You can butter and flour it, or you spray about a tablespoon of flour. My pan is prepped, my butter is creamed, and you can make this in a nine-by-five or a one-pound loaf pan. If you wanted to use a mini Bundt pan, that's acceptable as well. To sweeten things up and soften the cake, take one-and-a-half cups, or 300 grams, of granulated sugar. A half. A whole. And one-and-a-half. We're gonna mix for another two minutes on medium speed until it's nice and fluffed up. By the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every week. I'm gonna scrape the bowl down, and today we're gonna make a simple, beautiful, classic, plain vanilla pound cake. I love having it with some whipped cream and fruit, but there's a ton of add-ins you could add. I would say half a cup of blueberries or another favorite fruit. You could use chopped nuts. You could swap the extracts out. You could do fun glazes. You could add citrus zest. The world is your oyster here. It's a really easy recipe to adapt. Time to add four large eggs in. Room temperature, please. What do we have here? A shell. Aren't you glad that you cracked your egg into a separate bowl? How dare you? Okay, one. Two. And this is ridiculous. Look inside of here. It is pure, watery egg in the middle and compacted butter on the outside. It's like a giant Cadbury egg. All right, scrape the bowl down. I should probably adjust my mixer after this video. This flathead screw you see right here will adjust the mixer head up or down, so if it's scraping and clanging away, adjust it up. If there's a lot of unmixed nonsense at the bottom, adjust it down. Continue mixing, and we have two more eggs to go. One. And two. That's four in total. I'm very happy I used a bowl today. One last. One last scrape down. For a more tender crumb and a little bit of tang, I'm using half a cup or 120 grams of sour cream. Sour cream is a lovely ingredient for baking because it gives you some moisture. It's a weak acid that will react and kind of prevent gluten from forming those powerful bonds, and it just tastes good. It's not fun when a cake is uniformly sweet, so you wanna add a little bit of salt. You wanna add a little bit of zest or contrast. I also want two teaspoons of vanilla extract for some lovely flavor. Continue mixing on medium until everything's nicely incorporated. Now we can add the flour in and mix on low until it is almost combined. So I'll stop the mixer when I still see some streaks of flour. A nice pound cake is dense, but in a really pleasant way. It's not gummy, it's not tough, it's not chewy. So to keep that beautiful texture, you're gonna mix until just combined. Don't use too much flour and don't overmix. Those are the two rules that are really important in making a cake. They're perfect. No hidden flour, no hidden lumps of butter. We are ready to bake this up. Transfer your batter into your loaf pan. Level the batter out so it has a nice head start for a perfect bake. If you wanna control the way it cracks, you could add a little strip of cold butter in the center. This will bake for 65 minutes or so until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. In you go. Your pound cake will last up to five days in the refrigerator or three months in the freezer. Make sure it's well-wrapped if you're freezing it. Out of the oven, cooled just enough to cut and ready to enjoy. So soft and buttery on the inside with that crisp, dark, sugary crust. It's a delicious recipe I hope you get to enjoy. If you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my easy cake playlist.