Imagine a soft golden cake, with crisp white icing and sweet strawberries cascading down the sides of the perfectly proportioned slice.

This month’s featured recipe is the pound cake! It is such a simple, versatile, and delicious dessert.  I love how it tastes on its own, but also with icing, fruits, and ice cream!

Pound cake is sweet as well as pretty dense. This makes it a good strong base for desserts, especially when chilled! It is the perfect spring cake.

Pound cake originates from Great Britain from the 1700s. The basic ingredients include flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. At first, a pound of each ingredient was used, hence the name. However, nowadays anything with a 1:1:1:1 ratio can be considered a pound cake as well.

When I say versatile, I mean it. Not only are there different variations by country, but you can be creative since the base recipe is like a blank canvas. It’s called Madeira in Britain, quatre-quarts in France, panqué in Mexico, and in Germany, Rührkuchen.

Chocolate, Rum, bananas, using only egg whites, and lemon/orange juices are some of the ways to change up the original recipe a bit.

The cake is also traditionally made in a loaf pan or bunt cake shape, but you can make it into any shape you want. Consider muffin tins and round cakes as alternatives.

I feel like this is the chocolate chip cookie of cakes since you can easily manipulate it and play around with not only the ingredients you use, but also the techniques used when making the batter and baking it. These can also influence how moist the cake is, how well it rises, and what the texture is like.

So today, I will be sharing the simple, plain pound cake…feel free to experiment with it and find some new combination of flavors!

Recipe Courtesy: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/7376/pound-cake-i/?internalSource=rotd&referringId=395&referringContentType=recipe%20hub

Yield: 1 cake

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 5 egg yolks
• 5 egg whites
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp lemon extract (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350, and grease an 8 x 4 loaf pan. Dust flour inside as well to ensure the cake won’t stick.
2. Sift flour and baking powder. Set aside.
3. In a mixing bowl, cream sugar and butter. Beat in the egg yolks, then the flour mixture. Stir in the vanilla and/or lemon extracts.
4. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. First, fold ⅓ of the whites into the batter, then fold in the rest until there are no more white streaks.
5. Bake for 1 hour.
6. Enjoy! 🙂