Sometimes, simple works wonders. Things like pound cake have countless variations, but traditional pound cake is only four ingredients: Butter, Flour, Eggs, Sugar; a pound of each. Mixed all together (with a touch of technique), they create a tasty cake that’s delicious on its own and even better as the backdrop for fresh fruits and cream! It took every ounce of strength I had to not AT LEAST add vanilla, but I somehow stayed my hand.
There is something truly special about stripping down baking to its building blocks and understanding how ingredients work, what they do, and how they taste. The original concept of this blog was for me to bake as often as possible and share the discoveries of that journey. It’s pretty easy to slip into a “this is how you do it” mentality and skip over the “why you do it.” I’d like to get back to that a bit, and a recipe like this is a great one for it. I can’t wait to start experimenting! For now, here’s the product of a LOT of restraint on my part!
I am a big advocate of weighing ingredients instead of measuring, and in a recipe like this, that kitchen scale is your best friend. If you bake twice a year, the $10 you spend on even the cheapest of kitchen scales is going to be worth it. I promise it’s worth it, and you’ll probably bake more as a result!
Let’s talk a second about ingredients. Even with just four, you’ve got choices. I used cake flour instead of all-purpose flour. Either will work fine, but the cake flour will lighten it up a bit. You can choose between salted and unsalted butter. I usually only stock unsalted butter, however, I feel like salted butter is the right choice. You can always add a pinch of salt to compensate (and I did). You might not want to mess with the granulated sugar (right away 😉 ), as sugars are not created equal. Eggs are also just eggs.
Hold on, now! How are you supposed to measure out an exact pound of eggs? Eggs kind of come in pre-measured quantities, and it’s impractical to use just part of an egg. Start with eight large eggs, and get the weight of those. Maybe it’ll be just a bit short, or maybe you need a ninth to get there, even if you’ll be a bit over. Just use the same weight when measuring the dry ingredients. As long as the ratio stays equal, you’ll be fine!
Another thing you may have noticed is the lack of any leavening agent in pound cake. While pound cake is supposed to be dense, you do get a little rise from getting air into the batter before adding the flour.
I whipped my butter until it was light and fluffy, then added the sugar and creamed them together. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on the fastest speed you can without it sloshing out the top of the mixer. At the end of this phase, the batter may look like something curdled. Don’t fear! That’s what it’s supposed to look like!
Lower the mixer speed, and add the flour in three parts, mixing only until the flour is mostly mixed in before adding the next part. If you want to make sure to get as much rise as possible, you can do this by hand, but I don’t know that we need to be too fussy with something that’s expected to be dense anyway.
Since I knew I had four pounds total of ingredients, dividing the batter evenly was easy using the kitchen scale as a guide!
In addition to options with ingredients, you have options with loaf pans, too. My loaf pans are dark metal, which means I need to reduce the temperature to compensate. If you have tins like mine, bake at 325F. If your tins are a light grey, bake at 350F.
I started looking in at my cakes at 40 minutes, but they took exactly 50 minutes to bake to the point where a wooden skewer came out clean. You’ll likely need something longer than a toothpick to test. A knife would work ok in a pinch, too!
If you didn’t feel like you could be creative with your 4-ingredient cake, you have all kinds of creative liberties when it comes to eating it. You can make an icing. You can top it with berries and cream. You could top it with a scoop of ice cream and fudge or caramel. If you don’t finish it in a couple of days and it starts to taste a bit stale (who lets this happen?) you can toast it and drizzle it with honey or spread on some jam. Don’t think you can finish up both loaves in a week? (Seriously, I don’t even know who you are anymore!) Pound cake freezes really well, so you can wrap one up and save it for later! Can you imagine having some pound cake in your freezer that you can pull out and pop on the grill with some peaches for a summer BBQ? Yum!!
Traditional Pound Cake
The most traditional of pound cake recipes with only 4 ingredients, which is easy to customize and embellish. A true baking basic!
Ingredients
- 1 lb. Butter, Salted
- 1 lb. Flour
- 1 lb. Sugar
- 1 lb. Eggs
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat oven to 350F (325F if using dark colored pans). Grease and flour two 9×5 loaf pans
- Step 2 Whip room temperature butter until light and fluffy
- Step 3 Add sugar and cream together
- Step 4 Add eggs, one at a time, mixing completely in between
- Step 5 Add the flour in three batches, mixing each until fully incorporated
- Step 6 Divide batter and pour into prepared loaf pans
- Step 7 Bake at 350F (325F) for 45-55 min. until a knife or skewer inserted into the center come out clean
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