The Best Million Dollar Pound Cake Recipe - Miss in the Kitchen (2024)

FAQs

Why a cold oven is the secret to a better pound cake? ›

Starting your pound cake in a cold oven also impacts the texture of the cake. A longer bake time and lower temperature allows the leavening more time to work before the cake sets, resulting in a taller, fluffier cake.

Mistake: Overbeating The Eggs

Add eggs, one at a time, beating just until the yolk disappears. Overbeating the eggs may cause the batter to overflow the sides of the pan during baking or create a fragile crust that crumbles and separates from the cake as it cools.

"Gently" is key here; overmixing with a heavy hand will cause the batter to deflate, and all your hard work creaming will be reversed. The result will be a dense, tough cake. Use softened butter to grease the entire interior of your loaf pan.

According to Spoon University, over-mixing your cake batter in turn, over-activates the gluten in the flour. Stirring the cake batter both incorporates your ingredients and activates the gluten protein, so when you mix it too much, the texture of your pound cake becomes doughy like bread.

Transfer pan to oven, reduce temperature to 325°, and bake until top is golden and a tester inserted in center comes out clean, about 1 hour, 5 minutes. (Starting at a higher temperature, then dropping down gives the cake a jump-start before allowing it to bake nice and slowly, so it doesn't get too dark.)

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.

If you overmix cake batter the cake will fall as flat as a pancake once it is removed from the oven. By overmixing you incorporated far too much air into the batter. As the air heated in the oven the cake rose but once it was removed from the oven it did not have the structural integrity to maintain that shape.

Bundt pans are a baking essential. Their unique construction allows an even browning on denser cakes, like pound cake, with the well-defined curves that are the hallmark of the form. Bundts now come in the shape of rosettes, castles, and even pine forests.

Baking powder (optional)

However, unlike other cakes, pound cakes rely on air and eggs to rise. So it's inherently a dense cake with a close crumb. But baking powder can be added to make the cake rise a little more – especially if you're not fully sure that you mixed the ingredients well.

How To Make The BEST Pound Cake Recipe. Now that you're hip to the basic ingredients let's get right into the steps needed to prepare the BEST pound cake! In a large bowl add sifted flour, baking powder, and salt. Whisk together well to make sure all of the dry ingredients are combined.

Why did my pound cake turn brown inside? ›

Either you filled the cake pan too much and didn't bake the cake long enough. Or your oven needs a new heating element.

How long do you leave pound cake in the pan? When it's done baking, let the cake sit in the pan for 10 minutes: no more, no less. It's enough time for the cake to firm up some after baking so that it doesn't fall apart, but not so much time that the cake gets stuck to the pan.

Too much air and your cake will collapse because it simply can't hold onto all that air. Overbeating can add too much additional air and/or large air bubbles which the cake can't support, causing it to collapse in the oven.

You'll end up with a cake that's too dense and dry. If you're asking about adding flour to a batter, you usually add it in stages, alternating with the liquid. Adding it in two or three steps helps hydrate the flour more quickly and requires less stirring, which prevents gluten formation.

When you remove your cake from the oven, don't flip it out of the pan right away! Instead, let the cake cool for ten minutes in the pan. Then, placing the wire rack over the base of the cake, invert the pan. Peek under the wire rack and see if the cake has dropped out.

The overall idea though is that by placing the cake into the oven prior to preheating, that slow warmup allows the cake to rise better because it gives more time for the rising agents to work before the crust sets. This leads to a more fluffy result with a more delicate crust.

Starting in a cold oven gives those leaveners more time to work. In addition, the edges of the cake don't set as quickly when starting in a cold oven, which enables the cake to rise higher.

Putting the pot into a cold oven allows it to warm slowly as the oven heats up. It prevents any sort of thermal damage that might occur to the pot if it's heated empty. No oven mitts are needed here — the oven, pot, and dough inside are all room temperature.