Classic Butter Pound Cake Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best butter for baking pound cakes? ›

Best for Baking: Land O'Lakes Unsalted

The pound cake made with Land O'Lakes unsalted butter has a semi-even color with a very moist melt-in-your-mouth crumb and buttery aroma.

Butter cakes (also referred to as creamed cakes) have a lighter texture and greater volume than pound cakes. Pound cakes (named because they originally contained one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour) tend to be denser.

Pound Cakes are so named because originally they were made with one pound of butter, one pound of sugar, one pound of eggs, and one pound of flour. In France, a Pound Cake goes by the name Quatre Quarts, which means four quarters, referring to the quantities of the ingredients.

Texture:Cakes made with oil tend to be moister and have a more tender crumb. Oil coats the flour proteins better than butter, resulting in a softer texture. Cakes made with butter can have a richer flavor and a slightly firmer texture. Butter contributes to a more traditional and dense cake structure.

If you only have salted butter on hand, feel free to use it. Just keep in mind that it may slightly alter the taste of your cake, making it a tad saltier. To balance things out, you can reduce the added salt in the recipe by about half. Your cake will still be scrumptious and delightful, I promise!

Cake Flour: Cake flour is lighter than all-purpose flour and produces the best pound cake in my opinion. Since it's so light, the attention remains on the butter. All-purpose flour is simply too heavy for this pound cake recipe; the cake will be heavy as a brick. If needed, use this homemade cake flour substitute.

Simple Ingredients

A Kentucky Butter cake is the simplest cake you can find. The ingredients are truly pantry staples: eggs, butter, flour, sugar, baking soda, and buttermilk. Don't skip the buttermilk. Butternilk is essential for the rise of the cake and its tender texture.

How many eggs are in a pound? Eggs vary in weight since not all eggs are the same. Large eggs tend to weigh just short of 2 ounces each. It takes between 8 and 9 large eggs to equal one pound.

A steady 325-350 degrees is ideal when it comes to baking pound cake. Position the pan in the middle of the oven, and rotate it once, halfway through the baking time, as it bakes to account for any hot spots.

A bundt pan has decorative sides and tops that range from ridges to fruit, or other still life scenes. It is usually used for pound cake and other dense moist cakes such a coffee cakes. Pound cake batter has a lot more moisture than a standard cake batter due to all the butter, milk and eggs.

Can I use regular flour instead of cake flour? ›

Can I substitute all-purpose flour for cake flour? Yes, you can. You'll wind up with a similar cake, just with a slight difference in texture and crumb. Both flours perform the same in recipes — they'll mix into identical batters — but the final results will differ to a small degree.

Sift: Sifting the flour into the batter makes the cake lighter. It also breaks up any large clumps of flour, making it easier to incorporate into the batter.

Sometimes it is because you have the temperature too high. Other times it is because you didn't flour and oil the pan.

First, why the crack occurs: Since quick breads and pound cake batters tend to be thick and dense, the exterior bakes first. But as the center of the cake continues to bake, releasing moisture, it rises, pushing through the top crust, and creating a crack.

Unsalted butter gives you complete control of the overall flavor of your recipe. This is especially important in certain baked goods where the pure, sweet cream flavor of butter is key (butter cookies or pound cakes). As it pertains to cooking, unsalted butter lets the real, natural flavor of your foods come through.

Here we discuss the differences between butter, margarine spreads, shortening, lard and oil so that you can have a better understanding of the role fats play in your baking. Butter is the favoured fat to use in cakes and bakes and we use unsalted butter for all of our cakes in the bakeries.

This helps create more consistent results for home bakers replicating a recipe. In general, salted butter is preferred for cooking (or simply spreading) as it adds more flavour and has a longer shelf life, while unsalted butter is the go-to for baking.

Baking recipes typically call for unsalted butter because the amount of salt in salted butter varies depending on the brand – there is no “industry standard.” For example, if you use one brand of salted butter in a recipe, and we use another, our baked goods could end up tasting very different from one other.