American Classics with Scott Peacock: Pound Cake

-I'm Nancy Hopkins, food editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine and I'm with Scott Peacock and we're doing another great American classic, pound cake. Tell me what your pound cake is all about. -Pound cake originally was a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of eggs and butter. It's changed a little bit these days and we're making a cream cheese pound cake today. I like to start with cold butter. We're gonna beat some cream cheese into it. Equal parts cream cheese and butter so this is three cups of granulated sugar we've measured out and I like to put it on a piece of wax paper because it makes it a lot easier to add into the mixing bowl. I love the smell of that butter and the sugar mixed in together. I'm also gonna go ahead and put in salt. -Oh, okay. -A teaspoon of kosher salt. -Kosher salt. -This is a really important step here, taking our time to cream together the butter and the sugar and the cream cheese because what we're doing now is developing an airy, fluffy consistency. Don't skimp on this stuff. This is gonna take five to seven minutes. First of all, the eggs should be at room temperature. The butter and cream cheese were cold but the eggs were at room temperature so you can pull these out an hour before you're gonna make this, or if they're cold, you forget, just put them in a bowl and pour a little warm water over them for about 10 minutes and then drain the water off. -That's easy. -Yeah. And then, on relatively low speed, we're gonna start mixing in the eggs one at a time. -Large? -Large eggs, not any larger than large. We've added the last egg and you see how creamy, it's almost like a really thick mayonnaise or something right now. -Very much like that. -Really beautiful texture. A lot of people use a combination of vanilla and lemon to use. You could use nutmeg, almond, really, this is-- -This is where you can customize. -This is where you customize it, flavor, however you want. This is sifted. Very important. Sifted cake flour makes it lighter. -And three cups. -Three cups. -On low speed, you just start to mix it in a little bit of the time, so then I like to just fold-- -You're just folding-- -The last. Alright. So we're gonna bake these in two loaf pans and they need to be buttered and floured. I like to use soft butter. I think it's better than melted butter because melted butter tends to just run down the sides. This way, you can brush on a nice, even coat. We just a put a little bit of flour in here and then just sort of shake it around the sides. This next step is very important. You have to really knock all the excess flour out. You really just want sort of a whisper of flour and so, now, we'll just put the batter in between the two cake pans, then the most important thing is to have a nice drop, and that way if you have any big air bubbles in there, that helps it knock them out so you don't wind up with big tunnels in your cake. So we're gonna put these in a cold oven. -Why cold? -We're starting with a cold oven. I think it makes the batter rise a little more oven and so a little gentler on the cake also. -So how long did these bake? -These took about an hour and twenty minutes. You wanna start really peeking very carefully in the oven in about an hour and fifteen minutes and take a look and they're nice and golden brown and we took a skewer in the center to make sure that they were clean. -Uh huh. -And these have been resting here, cooling, for about eight minutes. -Okay. -And now we're gonna take them to get them out of the pan. I like to use a clean towel and just carefully unmold it like that, lift this up. -Perfect. -And then just roll it gently, carefully, back onto the cooling rack. -Wow. There's a reason this is a classic. This is one of my favorites. I'm Nancy Hopkins for Better TV.