Pound cake is a guilty pleasure of mine. I’m really not that much of a dessert fiend, but there’s just something about taking a slice of Sara Lee, wadding the entire thing up and stuffing it in your mouth.
Anyway, this is not a Sara Lee-style pound cake, but it’s veryvery tasty. I got the recipe from a Cook’s Illustrated newsletter and made a couple modifications.
Baker’s Joy or grease+flour
5 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup AP flour
1 tsp table salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup sour cream
2 Tbsp milk
14 Tbsp butter
1 1/4 cup white sugar
1 cup cranberries, chopped (fresh or frozen—if using frozen, thawing is unnecessary)
1 Tbsp confectioner’s sugar
dash of table salt
Prep a loaf pan with Baker’s Joy (or grease and flour the pan) and heat oven to 300. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk eggs and vanilla together in a separate bowl. Whisk sour cream and milk together in a third bowl. In a fourth bowl, toss cranberries with confectioner’s sugar and a dash of salt.
Put butter in a stand mixer and beat on medium with the paddle attachment until soft, 2–3 minutes, scraping down the bowl as needed. Add sugar and mix until light and fluffy.
Reduce speed to low and add egg mixture, then increase back to medium and mix for a minute, scraping down sides if necessary. (Mixture will look curdled, don’t panic.)
Reduce speed to low and add the flour mixture slowly in three pieces, alternating with the sour cream mixture. Scrape down sides as needed.
Gently fold by hand the cranberries into the batter.
Pour the batter into the loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours, rotating pan after an hour. Test starting at 1:30 with a toothpick (it did take nearly two hours, but I was paranoid about the long cooking time and hey better safe than sorry).
Cool in pan on wire rack for ten minutes. Remove from pan and completely cool on rack before serving.