Our Thoroughly Modern Pound Cake

Until the age of, oh, six months ago, the only pound cake ever to enter our sphere with any regularity was Sara Lee. You know the one: frozen, aluminum tin, red cardboard lid. As a child, we loved this cake. We loved its perfectly uniform spongy crumb, we loved its smooth, suede-like crust--reminiscent of the ice cream sandwiches that we also loved--and even now, we can’t deny that Sara Lee Moist and Delicious All Butter Pound Cake is certainly tasty. It’s just also sort of boring (and difficult to serve to our fellow chef friends with head held high).

Sara Lee Pound cake will always have a soft spot in our heart, but we’ve long known that the time was approaching for other, better pound cake. So back in March, when Saveur devoted an entire issue to butter, presenting (alongside a stunning amount of information on our favorite fat) a recipe for "The World’s Best Pound Cake," we knew that time was now.

Before we move forward, we should mention that pound cake gets its appropriately plain name from the cake’s original proportions: one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour--meaning, this cake weighed not one pound as many believe, but four. Over time the recipe has evolved as the original version is dense, hefty and absolutely enormous. Nonetheless, the simplicity and the straightforward flavor of its four main ingredients endure.

At first perusal, we were surprised to find that pound cake recipes (the Saveur one among many) are not like other recipes. Pound cake recipes are meticulous, demanding, and insistent on techniques almost to the point of superstition. "Sift the flour eight times!" "Never bake more than 73 minutes!" It was strange. Just as we made our foray into the uncertain world of homemade pound cake, away from Sara Lee and her unrelenting predictability, these cooks seemed to expect the same degree of consistency. These obsessive recipes seemed to suggest that sifting the flour and beating the eggs exactly as one’s mother did would produce a cake identical to one consumed twenty years prior. Evidently, the exact taste and texture of our childhood pound cakes hold nostalgic allure for us all.

To our mind, the modern pound cake should be flavored only with vanilla and a hint of lemon and, like its predecessor, be substantial enough to impress small children. On these fronts, the Saveur recipe (with a couple of minor changes) performed admirably. It has a nice tight crumb (just like Sara Lee), a crunchy crust, and a deliciously simple flavor. In our heavily edited version of the recipe, we’ve tried to present accurate techniques while not being too overbearing. But this was easy, we’re not trying to resurrect any ghosts of pound cakes past. We promise this pound cake is delicious, but if it’s not exactly like your grandmother’s, we offer our sincerest apologies.

The recipe can be found after the break. Enjoy.