Another One In the Arsenal?

While I was visiting my aunt in New Orleans, I spent my days watching cooking shows and leafing through her cookbooks and magazines. She has a nice selection of the Cook's Illustrated special publications. In one of these, I found a recipe for a Cold Oven Pound Cake. Me being the lazy person I am decided not to copy the recipe then. I have a CI online membership. Surely, I'd look it up when I got home. So, um yeah, it's not on the website. It's a Cook's Country recipe.

Wouldn't you know it? I had a copy of the recipe anyway. It's in my America's Best Lost Recipes. Silly me. This book takes a slight departure from the regular CI formula. As the recipes are submitted by readers, there isn't the usual lengthy preamble for each recipe. This is the first time I've used a recipe from this book. I'm writing as it bakes, so we'll see how well it does.

I'm slightly worried because I had to violate a specific note in the book. You're supposed to use skim or 1% milk for this. For once, I only had 2% and whole. Oh well.

Let's get started, shall we?

The batter has four parts: wet, dry, fats and leavening. The dry is flour and salt. Wet is milk vanilla and egg yolks. Fats are butter and shortening (these are creamed with sugar). The leavening is egg whites! In a pound cake??! You'll see.

Whisk your flour and salt.

Cream the butter, sugar and shortening.

Whisk the egg yolks, milk and vanilla.

Now, beat the egg whites until you get soft peaks. This is where having two mixing bowls for Old Faithful really pay off. Make sure your bowl and whisk attachment are impeccably clean. I wipe mine down with a little vinegar just to be sure.

Alternate adding the flour and liquid to the fat. Start and end with the flour. Mix each addition just until incorporated.

Here's the batter after the last addition. See the dry flour? Don't let the mixer run until it's fully incorporated. You run the danger of over mixing and creating a tough cake with tunnels in the crumb.

 Finish up by hand. Isn't that pretty?

Gently fold in your egg whites. The first batch I fold in are sacrificial; they get stirred into the batter. They are used to lighten the batter so that folding in the rest will be easier. The rest are folded. Here's the finished batter.

Move on to your prepared cake pan.

Move on to your cold oven.

Bake for 45 minutes at 300 degrees. Increase temp to 325 and bake 45 more minutes. Nothing left to do now but wait (and clean up the kitchen).

The cake is done. I am disappointed in the crust, but I take 100% of the blame. I didn't use the right type of milk and I lowered the oven temperature by 15 degrees because my Bundt pan tends to cook quicker than the average pan. I'll go strictly by the book next time and update the post.

Here's the cake - cut into and enjoyed by some What's Cookin' Chicago Meetup members. The flavor was excellent. Just gotta nail the crust.

Tools of the Trade

• Pyrex Measuring Cup
• Williams-Sonoma Gold Touch Bundt Pan
• KitchenAid Stand Mixer

Christmas Morning

It's 3:47 Christmas morning. My pound cake has been in the oven for a little over 30 minutes and I think I'm sleep walking or sleep blogging. The cake is a do-over. When the efficient, energetic me got in yesterday after two rounds at Target, a trip to the bank and Home Depot after a 5 a.m. rise to make dressing and sweet potato pie after having stood on my feet for four hours welcoming Christmas shoppers the night before -- I set the oven to 200 degrees. ( How's that for Faulkneresque?) Two hours later, I wondered why I didn't smell cake throughout the house. After adjusting the temp, it still didn't come out right. Since it was for someone else's Christmas dinner, I had to make it again.

This is the most requested thing I make. It's not baked crack like Cakeman Raven's red velvet cake in Brooklyn, but it is the best damn pound cake I've ever had. It is unbelievably moist with this crust that just gets better the next day. I thought about getting the new Nordic Ware Anniversary Bundt pan for it, but it would ruin the crust to serve it upside down. I might get the pan anyway. Who am I kidding? Of course I'm getting the pan. I haven't made a Bundt cake since high school.

I digress. People have tried to recreate my pound cake because I won't give out the recipe. The funny thing is, I'm not even a big pound cake fan. Give me a cake with some icing. I only bake this cake for others.

I sit here now half dazed, not quite sleepy enough to go back to bed and not awake enough to really cook anything else. The last time I tried to cook in this state, I got a little too careless with my knife skills. I know the next items on the docket should be the red velvet cupcakes and dinner rolls, but they will have to wait. I think I'll watch A Christmas Story.

I haven't completely figured out my own Christmas menu. I have a Cornish hen and lots of fresh veggies: Brussels sprouts, potatoes, carrots, green beans, sweet potatoes, beets and butternut squash. I'm not quite sure about what I want to eat or how to prepare it.

Back to the cake:

I cream the butter and sugar forever. I use the time to gather the other ingredients and prep the pan.



Each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next one.



This is a no-holds-barred pound cake. Look at how thick the batter is! I've seen recipes that have called for cake flour instead of AP. If you want a lighter cake, make a different type. This is one tradition I will not break.



The batter is four pounds! It won't move unless you move it.



Look at the top.


Heaven in your mouth!
Tools of the trade:

• KitchenAid Stand Mixer
• NordicWare Angel Food Pan

Baking Machine

I have to completely pat myself on the back for this one. I pulled off three baked goods on Sunday (a first for me):

• whole wheat buttermilk biscuits
• blueberry muffins
• pound cake

Now I was so tired from the baking that I didn't make my usual Sunday dinner, but that's okay. I made it Monday and had a couple of friends over.

The biscuits had just an unbelievable flavor. I think I may prefer these to regular biscuits. The only thing I didn't like about them was the shape. The recipe called for the dough to be divided into round balls and placed touching in a pan. I'm a sucker for perfectly round cut biscuits. Anything else looks like a roll. Mine looked exactly like the picture above. They also keep really well.

The blueberry muffins were my response to not having anything sweet in the house. I made them in a muffin top pan and par-baked them. In the mornings, I pop one in the toaster until the top is nice and brown. I spread lemon curd on top and it's the best!

The pound cake was old faithful. My dad gave me this recipe and it is always a hit. Although I never bake one for me (I'm not a big pound cake fan) it's my signature dish. I baked this one for a co-worker who catered lunch for her entire department. I got to sneak in for a plate. I love anyone who will feed me dressing and hers was excellent. My pound cake was a thank-you and it went over well. Although I've only screwed it up once, I'm always nervous about it, so I usually end up slicing it up. This one was A-okay. Everyone enjoyed it.

Do all cooks crave approval? I damn near held my breath as people tried the cake!