Pound cakes got their name from the weight of their ingredients, typically one pound each of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. The hallmark of a pound cake is its compact, firm texture produced by vigorous beating of butter and sugar, then eggs, to create millions of tiny air cells that expand in the oven’s heat causing the cake to rise magnificently.
How to Make a True Pound Cake with No Chemical Leavening
Many bakers today, unfortunately, add baking powder to open up the cake’s structure and to lighten the texture, a practice I do not agree with because it changes the very nature of the cake. A true pound cake contains no chemical leavening. The question became how to give the cake a quality of lightness while retaining the texture of a true pound cake without adding chemical leavening. I decided to make a smaller cake than the traditional recipe—huge 5-pound pound cakes are impractical in today’s homes—so I cut the recipe in half and baked it in a loaf pan instead of the more usual tube pan.
I used cake flour, lower in gluten than all-purpose flour, and added a small amount of potato starch. Bruce Healey says in The Art of the Cake that potato starch can absorb ten times the liquid of wheat starch. By substituting ten-percent of the wheat flour with potato starch, I hoped the cake would have extra moistness.
Egg yolks also add moistness, so I used 3 large eggs and 4 large egg yolks instead of 5 whole eggs. So far my measurements by weight were consistent with a classic pound cake formula: 8 ounces eggs and yolks, 8 ounces butter, a scant 8 ounces flour. The last major ingredient is sugar, and I used 1 1/4 cups, just a tad more than 8 ounces, because sugar creates tenderness and contributes sweetness. Was there anything else I might add to enhance tenderness and moistness? I recently came across a recipe in a revised edition of Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts called The King’s Pound Cake, a recipe Ms. Heatter had found in the August 16, 1997, TV Guide, claiming it to be “Elvis Presley’s Favorite Pound Cake.” Technically it’s not a pound cake because it contains 1 teaspoon of baking powder.
Cream in a Pound Cake?
But what it does have, which accounts for its terrific texture, is a generous amount of heavy cream. That was it! I’d add heavy cream to the batter. The cake turned out exactly as I had hoped. It had a domed top, a gorgeous sugary crust on all surfaces, the texture was tight and compact, it tasted of butter and vanilla, and it really did melt on the tongue. Here’s the recipe.