Servings: 20
Preheat: 350
Prep Time: 25 minutes
Source: Melissa Grey, NPR
I call this cake the Man Catcher because, really, no man can resist it. Oh, he might be able to resist YOU, but not this cake: it’s really good, but it’s no Love Potion No. 9. There are, however, seven secrets to creating the Man Catcher: Measuring, Creaming, Beating, Beating, Beating, Greasing, and No Peeking.
Ingredients:
You’ll Need:
A 10 inch tube pan
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter at room temperature
3 cups sugar
5 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon orange extract
Directions:
One
“Always read your recipe before you begin.”
Heck, read it BEFORE you go to the grocery store for your ingredients. Why? I’ll tell you why: You need to make your list o’ things to get, AND you need to go over your list o’ what you already got. Inventory yourself: Do you have salted butter or unsalted? You want unsalted. And if you have it, how old is it? Unless it’s frozen, it won’t last as long in the refrigerator as you might expect. Nor do eggs. And what size eggs are those, anyway? They should be large. Forgot to pick up enough sugar? Don’t even think you can substitute confectioners’ sugar. And that flour you have smartly stored in the refrigerator? If it’s self-rising and you use it for this cake, oh, expect some problems. And speaking of problems, lurking in your pantry is a tin of baking powder from two years ago—roughly the last time you tried making a cake. It’s probably deactivated by now. Its only purpose is to lull you into a false sense of security, then crush your cake-baking will. Smell your flavorings: are they still liquid? Anything unpleasant?
Another reason you want to read through your recipes before you begin: you want to understand what techniques you’ll be using to make said cake. If there’s something you don’t know, or aren’t clear about, it’s time to get online and Google it or, better yet, call a friendly, experienced baker.
Here are the directions for Grandma Gray’s Sour Cream Pound Cake, almost exactly as she scrawled them on an index card, with only a few changes for clarification:
Sour Cream Pound Cake
Center rack in oven and preheat to 350 degrees F
Prepare a pan.
Cream butter and sugar.
Add eggs
Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl.
Alternately add flour mixture and sour cream.
Add extracts. Beat until flavorings are incorporated and mixture looks smooth and even.
Pour batter into prepared pan.
Bake 90 minutes.
There’s a lot of baking shorthand in this. What does “cream” mean? Do I add the eggs all together? How do I combine the dry ingredients? What’s a tube pan? How does it get greased? Is the cake absolutely done at 90 minutes?
So many questions, grasshopper. But Grandma Gray is not alone; many recipes assume you know exactly what they’re talking about.
Two
“Center rack in oven and preheat to 325 degrees F.”
That’s our SECOND important step to making a cake, after we’ve read over the recipe.
What does “center rack” mean? Take a look at your tube pan. Look at how tall it is—I’m guessing about 412 inches. When you put that pan in the oven, you want the body of the cake to be as dead center as possible: the better for even baking. Next, look at your rack in the oven and figure out how low or high it needs to be so that your cake goes where it should—in the center of the oven.
“Preheat” means exactly what you think it means. So does 325 degrees F (Fahrenheit).
Three
“Prepare a pan.”
This is not about sitting down and having a conversation or exam review with your cake pan; it’s about getting your pan all nice and greasy. Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking to have used fresh ingredients and a proper mixing technique only to have the Man Catcher refuse to rise to its full glory?
For this cake, I specified a 10-inch, basic tube pan (a tube pan has straight sides, tube in the middle). This recipe also works well in a Bundt pan (a Bundt pan has decorative sides, tube in middle. I’ll tell you more about the history of Bundt pans later in the book). If you want to try this cake in a 9–inch square pan or a couple of loaf or layer pans, it will work fine, but you’ll need to halve the quantity for each ingredient in the recipe and halve the baking time. But a tube pan is the pan of choice for pound cakes as far as I’m concerned, and every baker needs one.
A pound cake, after all, has a dense batter. Originally they were made with a pound of sugar, a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of eggs; that’s why it’s called a pound cake. (What, you thought I wasn’t going to explain that to you? Oh, ye of little faith.) Large amounts of dense batter tend to bake better in tube pans, simply because that tunnel in the middle gets the heat into the center, thus avoiding the problem of overbaked on the outside, underbaked on the inside. We don’t like gooey when a lot of eggs are involved. That’s not just a baking faux pas, it’s an icky no-no.
If you’re using a traditional tube pan that’s flat on the bottom, you can line the bottom with parchment paper. You just put the pan, bottom down, on the paper, trace the outside, then trace that hole on the inside, remove the pan, and cut out the large donut you just made. Place it in the bottom of the pan.
Traditionally, you’d now take the wax paper that was once wrapped around your butter and grease the inside of your pan, including the parchment liner, and then sprinkle flour all over the bottom and sides. But sometimes, tradition needs to go away. Pam makes this great baking spray that includes flour. There’s also another brand called Baker’s Joy. I love this stuff. I’m tempted to use it as deodorant and hair spray, but it’s not really designed for that. Spray your tube pan (or Bundt pan, if you’re using that instead), including the center column.
Four
“Cream butter and sugar.”
Creaming is the process of dissolving the sugar into the fat. Your goal is to have a creamy-looking mixture. That’s why it’s called creaming. D’oh!
Your first impulse might be to unwrap and dump 2 cold, hard sticks of unsalted butter into the mixer, followed by 3 heaping cups of granulated sugar. Your second impulse would be to crank up the mixer and stand back. Your third impulse would be to sing “Babaloo,” because that’s the weird rhythm you’re going to hear as the 2 cold, hard sticks of butter tumble around the mixer on high speed over
3 heaping cups of granulated sugar.
I like Desi Arnaz, but those impulses are all wrong. A full-blown baking NO NO NO. You’ll end up with big chunks of sugar-covered butter. It will not be creamed. You will have failed. Resist those impulses (except for singing “Babaloo,” I say go for that one) and do this instead (it’s a secret most recipes don’t spell out for you):
At least 1 hour BEFORE you’re ready to begin baking, set out your butter and eggs. You want them at room temperature, because that’s going to make creaming sooooo much easier. Ideally, your butter should be soft enough so that you can make an indentation in the stick by pressing on it gently with your finger.
Cut your room-temperature butter into tablespoon-sized pats and put these pats in the mixing bowl. Start your engine and mix for 1 or 2 minutes at medium speed until the butter is smooth and no longer resembles a pile of solid yellow squares.
Next step: you’re going to measure out your sugar. Not heapin’ helpings, either—you’re going to use the dip, scoop, and level method: Dip your cup into your bag or container, scoop it up, then, holding the cup above said bag or container, run a knife, or your finger, over the top of the cup to level it off.
Using this method, measure out 3 cups of sugar and put them aside in a prep bowl. Working from your prep bowl, measure 12 cup of sugar, add it to the butter, and beat for 1 minute on medium speed. Continue adding the sugar this way until all 3 cups are thoroughly creamed (that’s 6 half cups and 6 minutes of beating).
Ooooooh, drives you crazy, doesn’t it, the time this takes? Remember: the goal here is to dissolve the sugar into the fat. Room temperature and time are your BFFs (that’s “best friends forever” for those of you who don’t text).
Five
“Add eggs.”
That means one at a time, mixing to incorporate the egg into the batter before adding the next one. And about those eggs: there will come a time when you’ve cracked a henhouse full and you’ve mastered the crack-’em-on-the-side-of-the-mixing-bowl-with-the-mixer-still-running maneuver, but until you’ve hit that stage of maverick derring-do, STOP the mixer and GENTLY crack open each egg. The LAST thing you want are crunchy bits of shell in your cake, and the second-to-last thing you want to do is waste valuable time and energy fishing out tiny bits of shell from your batter. We all know. We’ve all done it at least once. It’s OK. We’ve all since promised to do better with our batter.
If you’re going crazy just standing there, waiting while you cream each egg with the butter, you have my permission to multitask. This is why I prefer a stand mixer: it frees up my hands for other things. Set a timer for 1 minute after each egg addition and while you’re carefully creaming, you can measure out and sift together your dry ingredients.
Six
“Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl.”
And about that sifting: Modern flour milling methods give us lump-free, fluffy flour, so traditional sifting (using a nifty hand sifter, THEN measuring out from what you’ve sifted) is not usually necessary. Life has gotten easier for us in this twenty-first century, hasn’t it?
I take a hand whisk and whisk my flour, be it in the container or the bag, as precautionary fluffing: This is because flour settles and sometimes it can get lumpy. Next, I measure the flour into a separate bowl the way I measure sugar: dip, scoop, and level. I then measure out my other dry ingredients into that bowl and whisk together. No big whoop. And it’s fun in a “Look at me! I’m not using a sifter! I’m CHEATING!” kind of way.
Seven
“Alternately add flour mixture and sour cream.”
You’ve got about 3 cups of the flour mixture and 1 cup of sour cream to work with, and you want to gradually add these to the creamed mixture, so everything gets nice and evenly mixed together. So . . .
Shift the mixer to the lowest speed. Add about 1 cup of the flour mixture and mix to incorporate. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl with a spatula. Add 12 cup of sour cream. Switch to medium speed and mix until incorporated. Stop the mixer. Repeat, ending with a final addition of about 1 cup of the flour mixture.
Again, you’re taking your time with this step because you want nice, even distribution. You’re also beating air into that batter, which will ultimately help the cake stand nice and tall.
Eight
“Add extracts. Beat until flavorings are incorporated and mixture looks smooth and even.”
In this case the flavorings are vanilla, lemon, and orange extracts. I add one extract, give the mixer a brief spin, then add another, spin, add the last, and give it one last spin. And then I let the mixer run on medium-high speed for another 2 minutes.
That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?
Here’s another direction you’re going to see a lot in baking:
Nine
“Pour batter into prepared pan.”
Start pouring the batter, GO EASY, and then, while tipping your mixing bowl over the cake pan, use your spatula like a border collie and herd the batter that’s coating the sides and bottom of the bowl into the main pour stream. Pour the batter against only one side of your pan and let it lava its way to the other side. You don’t want any big air pockets getting in there. Air pockets range from pea size to plum size. They can disrupt the baking process and leave craters in your finished cake. (Air bubbles, which help the cake rise, are much smaller—from microscopic to the size of an eraser.)
Do not—DO NOT—fill your tube pan to the rim. NO NO NO NO. Remember, this cake is going to get all patriotic and stand up tall, what with all the air bubbles we’ve beaten into it during our prolonged mixing process. Fill the pan no higher than 1 12 inches below the rim.
Using your spatula, even out the batter in the pan. If you suspect air pockets, just tap the sides of the pan a couple of times and wait for a belch from the deep.
Ten
“Bake 90 minutes.”
(If you make a test cake with leftover batter, it will need to come out of the oven 30 minutes earlier than the big cake. Put the test cake on a lower rack toward the side of the oven. Centering does not apply to test cakes when you’re also baking a bigger one.)
Now, “Bake 90 minutes” does not mean “open the door every 15 minutes to make sure the cake hasn’t escaped.” No. This brings me to another instruction I want you to burn into your cerebral cortex: Do not molest the cake while it’s in the oven. Do not open the oven door. Do not even THINK about opening the oven door. Cakes are shy by nature. They get embarrassed very easily and will collapse like fainting Southern belles under your greedy, lusty gaze.
True confession: constantly “checking” the cake was once one of my worst baking habits (in addition to “creaming” entire sticks of cold butter with all the sugar at one time). Every time the oven door opens, it lowers the oven temperature, causes vibrations, and disrupts the rise of the batter. It’s a great way to get a heavy, thick, fallen cake and no happy cake dance for you.
If I’m worried about cake batter overflow, I make sure to line the bottom rack of the oven with aluminum foil before the cake pan goes in. Better yet, I don’t fill my pans too high. But I do not even consider opening the door unless it’s 10 minutes before the timer will go off or I smell smoke. The oven gods have been kind, and I’ve had few fallen cakes since adopting this habit.
Here’s a tip for all you aspiring Martha Stewart perfectionistas: don’t stomp around the kitchen while your cake is baking. Proceed with your cleanup placidly and calmly, like you’re on Prozac or Valium and everything is fine, fine, fine with the stock market. Make your kitchen a no-fly zone if you have kids, pets, or inquiring partners, too.
Let me tell you a story while you’re filling the sink with hot, sudsy water. Papa, my mother’s father, LOVED fallen cakes. Some people do. When he was a boy, during the Depression, his job was to keep the kitchen stove going. That meant adding wood every so often. If a cake was baking, he’d DROP the wood into the fire box extra hard and SLAM the door for good measure, hoping the vibrations would result in a fallen cake. And often he was a lucky boy, indeed. Not sure how his momma felt about it.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Your timer just went off. Get a long toothpick, a thin skewer, or a knife and have it at the ready.
Using oven mitts, pull your oven rack about halfway out of the oven, exposing half of your cake, which, as you recall, is centered on the rack. Poke your toothpick, thin skewer, or thin knife into the middle of the cake ring. If it comes out clean, your cake is done. If not, back in the oven with it for 10 minutes (15 if it comes out gooey), then retest. Continue doing this until your toothpick or knife comes out clean.
Why not pull the whole pan out of the oven rather than pull out the rack? Remember what I said about fallen cakes? Yeah. Exactly. If your cake is not quite done, you’re risking a fallen cake by manhandling the pan into much cooler air.
Tip: Here’s something experienced home bakers will tell you, but many cookbooks won’t: as you bake more, you’ll get to know your oven. I bake in a small, apartment-sized gas oven. It’s a slow oven. Often, recipes that say “90 minutes” will take me 10 more minutes. If the windows are open in the house and there’s a breeze blowing, it will take even longer. It’s just the way my oven is, and yes, I dream of replacing it one day. But I’ve learned how to compensate for its slacker ways. My father-in-law has an electric oven and it’s fast. When a recipe says “90 minutes,” I visually check the cake at 75 minutes. Fortunately, he has a glass window, so I don’t have to open the door and startle the cake. My mother’s oven is just right: if a recipe says “90 minutes,” usually the cake is ready at 90 minutes. But my point here is this: Get to know whether you have a slow oven, a fast oven, or a just-right oven and take that knowledge into account, Goldilocks, when a recipe tells you “bake 90 minutes.”
When the cake tests done, remove it from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 15 to 30 minutes. When the cake has pulled away from the sides of the pan, and the pan is touchable, it’s time to remove the cake. Here’s how: if your cake is in a straight-sided pan, take a butter knife and gently run it all the way around the inside, loosening up any cake that’s stuck. If it’s in a decorative Bundt pan, skip the part with the knife. I hope you did a mighty fine job with the baking spray 2 hours ago.
Getting back to the straight-sided tube pan: If you like the way the top of the cake looks, all brown and dome shaped with little cracks showing a slip of moist yellow crumb (oops, sorry—that’s a little cake pornography there), get a sheet of parchment paper to cover the top. Get a plate. Invert a cake rack onto top of pan. Place one hand squarely under the pan and the other hand squarely on top of the inverted rack. In one easy motion, flip the pan so that the rack is now holding the weight of the cake. You may hear a tell tale thwump as the cake drops to the rack.
Put the rack on a table or counter and gently lift your cake pan slightly—it may require a very small shake to fully unmold the cake. Peel away the parchment paper. Next, take your plate and place it upside down on your upside-down cake. Again, with one hand squarely on the plate, then the other on the rack, squarely over the cake, flip your cake in one easy motion. Let the cake cool before before covering.
If you’re using a Bundt pan, then the top of your cake will actually become the bottom. If it’s too dome shaped, you’ll want to get a long, serrated knife and level the cake off—this has the added bonus of giving you something to snack on right away. (If you’re using a tube pan and you don’t like the look of the top of your cake, treat it the same way.) After you’ve trimmed it to make the top (really, the bottom) flat and even, get your serving plate or cake rack, place it upside down over the top of the Bundt pan, place one hand squarely on the inverted plate, the other under the pan, and flip your handful in one easy motion. Listen for that thwump sound. Place the plate on the counter and lift up the cake pan very slightly. In a few seconds, the cake should drop easily onto the cake rack and you can remove the pan. Remember—a small shake if it seems stuck. Cool to room temperature, transfer to a plate if needed, and serve.