Saturday Oven Lovin'

I tried making my first Pound Cake on Thursday morning.  I looked up recipes in the old standby's (Joy of Cooking and BH&G Cook Book) as well as online.  The BH&G recipe called for shortening instead of butter; I just didn't trust a pound cake recipe that used shortening instead of butter.  And I though that it was called a "Pound" cake because there was like a whole pound of every major ingredient in it, and many of the recipes did not adhere to this. 

So I did a little web searching and found this one:

3 cups cake flour
6 large eggs
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup buttermilk

325 degree oven for an hour and ten minutes.

Pound of sugar, check.  Pound of butter, check.  Crapload of eggs, check.  Nothing else fancy or frilly or "new and improved" in order to make the good old version of a pound cake more "modern".   Sounded good to me.

The batter itself was beater-lick'n good so I was hoping for an exceptional baked version.

Never having made a pound cake before (as if I were living on Mars or something where I didn't have access to butter and eggs), I wasn't sure how the batter was supposed to look like, but figured it was going to be thicker than normal cake mix.  Which it was.

The cake itself was very dense, like a pound cake.  And oh so buttery.  And oh so good.  And oh so how many extra layers of cellulite would you like on your thighs, thank you very much.

But the consistency just wasn't right.  Although it was a dense cake, it still had a crumb-like texture.  Not crumbly by any means, but it was definitely not what I would consider a pound cake kind'a consistency.  Unless I've been so used to eating commercially produced pound cakes that I didn't know what an actual honest to goodness real homemade cake was supposed to be like.

Did I beat the batter too much?  Too little?  Did I not have all my ingredients exactly at 70 degrees?  Did I fail to sift the dry ingredients enough?  

I guess I'll not know until I try out another recipe.  But in the meantime, we're enjoying every slice of my first-ever pound cake.

Got a recipe you'd like to share with the blogosphere?  Then go over to Tiny Gardener's blog and share your recipe (possibly for a pound cake???) with her.