Pound Cake
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon lemon extract 5 eggs 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon Royal Baking Powder Cream butter, add sugar slowly, beating well. Add flavoring and yolks of eggs which have been beaten until pale yellow. Beat three egg whites until light and add alternately a little at a time with the flour which has been sifted with baking powder. Mix well and bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven about one hour. Cover with ornamental frosting made with the two remaining egg whites.
A Royal Baking Powder promotional recipe from the era when the company was persuading cooks that even pound cake wanted chemical leavening. It works as written; a few conversions and one accounting note make it easier to follow.
- Read the egg count firstFive eggs go into the cake bowl but only three whites; the remaining two whites are reserved for the frosting. Separate all five at the start and set two whites aside in a covered dish before you begin creaming.
- Moderate oven350F. A loaf this dense needs the full hour, sometimes a little more; test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Pan sizeA standard 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Grease it and line the base with parchment, since a rich, high-butter batter clings. Fill no more than two-thirds.
- Cup measures1 cup butter is 8 oz / 225 g, two sticks. 1 cup sugar is about 7 oz / 200 g, 2 cups sifted flour about 8 oz / 225 g.
- Not a true pound cakeThe classic formula is equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, with no chemical leavening. Here the weights sit close to that, but a teaspoon of baking powder does part of the lifting, so the crumb comes out lighter and more open than the name suggests.
- Creaming is the hingeBeat the butter and sugar until genuinely pale and aerated, several minutes with an electric mixer, and add the yolks in a slow stream so the emulsion holds. Fold the beaten whites and flour in alternately with a light hand; overworking after the whites go in gives a tough, tunnelled loaf.
- ExtractsA teaspoon each of vanilla and lemon extract is assertive by current taste. Grated zest of one lemon in place of the lemon extract gives a cleaner flavour.
- The frosting"Ornamental frosting" is uncooked royal icing: raw whites beaten with confectioners' sugar and a little lemon juice, stiff enough to pipe. If the cake is for children, the elderly or anyone pregnant, use pasteurized whites or meringue powder, or bake the cake plain.
- YieldOne loaf, twelve to fourteen slices. It keeps three or four days well wrapped and slices better on the second day.
Pound cake takes its name from its proportions rather than any place or person: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, a formula easy to remember in kitchens where nobody owned graduated cups. It reached English cookbooks in the eighteenth century and travelled to America with them, where the whole rise came from long beating of eggs and butter. This version shows what happened after commercial baking powder arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and it appears to have put a teaspoon of the product into recipes that had never needed it, pound cake included. The result is a hybrid: the butter-and-sugar creaming and separately beaten whites of the older method, plus insurance from the tin. The two leftover whites turned into ornamental frosting reflect a habit of the period, when nothing in an egg was wasted and elaborate piped icing was the mark of a cake made for company.