Sour Cream Pound Cake

So, I just baked my first pound cake today. (10/24/10) In fact, I am typing this post as it's baking in the oven right now.

I can't believe how it's already the end of October! Wow, then it's going to be November and then I will have to send in my college apps. These days I really wanted to bake some bread, especially some bread with matcha. However, my kitchen scale was not functioning even after I changed the batteries. Then one day I tried looking at the scale again and it worked. Whewf...I was so worried that my scale broke. It does use up batteries quite fast though.

I made this pound cake for English class because we just read the book Frankenstein, and now we have a non-fiction research project. I decided to do one on food during the Romanticism period. I discovered that pound cakes were created during the 1700s and that they are called pound cakes because of the simplicity of the ingredients. A pound of butter, sugar and butter along with some eggs would give a pound cake. Back then, most women couldn't read so just memorizing the ingredients by pounds made it much easier for them to make pound cakes.

Then I immediately thought of Von's recipe. She shared this beautiful pound cake recipe on her blog. It looked amazing! The texture was perfect and everything, so I just had to make it. I was a bit doubtful of how mine would turn out and I didn't get to try the recipe out until today because I ran out of yogurt/sour cream.

However, after making it, it wasn't that bad. I was worried mine would not turn out because I have very few successes on baking cakes. Luckily for me, the batter was pretty thick and it smelled really good. The only sad part was that there were a lot of holes in my pound cake.... it didn't look like Von's pretty, tight crumbed, yummy looking cake. I'm guessing that I might have overbeaten the eggs and incorporated extra air into the batter, causing the little holes. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

Sour Cream/Yogurt Pound Cake
Recipe from Vondelicious who got it from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook


Ingredients

90g butter (I used 95g)
1 cup sugar (I decreased it by a bit too)
3 eggs, room temperature
½ cup sour cream or yogurt, room temperature (I lost track of the sour cream I used. I was measuring it out in tablespoons because I my 1/4 cup measuring cup disappeared. I lost track @ around 6-7 tablespoons...)
1 ½ cups plain flour
¼ tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
½ tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325*F. Prepare a 8x4 or 9x5 loaf pan. (I used a 9x5)

Make sure the butter, eggs and sour cream are at room temperature. Instead of letting them stand at room temperature for 30 minutes, I micro waved the sour cream for 10 seconds in 2-5 second intervals to make sure that it did not curdle. I also did the same with the butter to speed up the process. For the eggs, I put them in a bowl with warm water to heat them up, water that was warm enough to bring the eggs to room temperature without cooking them in their shells.

Sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda together in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, beat the butter with the electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds, gradually adding in the sugar. I creamed the two ingredients together in less than 10 minutes. After the butter and sugar mixture is light and fluffy, beat in the vanilla. Then, beat in the eggs one at a time, around 1 minute each egg. (Von’s note: don’t overbeat the eggs, otherwise the cake will be tougher)

Add in the flour mixture and sour cream or yogurt to the butter mixture in separate additions. What I did was add 1/3 of the flour, then ½ of the sour cream, another third of the flour, the rest of the sour cream and then all the remaining flour, beating them in in that many additions so that they were uniform in mixture, but not overbeaten. (Please refer to Von’s blog for more details :)

Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake the pound cake at 325*F for around 60-75 minutes. After that, cool on a wire rack for around 10 minutes before removing the cake from the pan to cool completely

Note: Fresh from the oven, the cake and its texture was really nice. The texture reminded me of velvet for some reason. It was just really soft and yummy. Then I froze it for the English project and sliced it the next day so that it stayed fresh. Maybe freezing it changed the texture a bit because it wasn't as soft as before after it defrosted.