Home › Cake-Making › Pyramid Pound Cake
Pyramid Pound Cake
One pound sugar, one of butter, one of flour, ten eggs; bake in a dripping-pan one inch in thickness; cut when cold into pieces three and a half inches long by two wide, and frost top and sides; form on the cake stand in pyramid before the icing is quite dry by laying, first in a circle, five pieces with some space between them; over the spaces between these lay five other pieces, gradually drawing in the column and crowning the top with a bouquet of flowers. -Mrs. Dr. Thompson.
A true pound cake — equal weights of sugar, butter, flour, and no chemical leavening at all, the lift coming entirely from air beaten into the butter and the ten eggs. The recipe is written for a cook who already knows that, so the mixing method and the oven are left unsaid.
- The hinge: air, not baking powderWith no soda or powder, everything depends on creaming the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, then adding the eggs a little at a time so the batter never breaks. Fold the flour in by hand at the end; overworking it after the flour goes in gives a tough, close crumb that will not hold a pyramid.
- Scale it downA pound each of butter, sugar and flour plus ten eggs is roughly a four-and-a-quarter-pound batter — enough for about one half-sheet pan, which it will not quite fill to a full inch, and something like twenty of the finished 3½ x 2 inch bars. Quartering the recipe (4 oz each, 2 to 3 eggs) suits a household oven, though in a 9-inch square pan it will sit shallower than an inch.
- Ten eggsPeriod eggs ran smaller than today's large. Ten modern large eggs weigh about 1¼ lb in the shell, nearer 1.1 lb shelled; eight to nine large eggs is closer to a pound and keeps the ratio honest.
- Dripping-panA dripping-pan was the shallow rectangular pan set under a roast. Use a rimmed baking sheet or a shallow roasting pan, buttered and lined with parchment, and fill it to about an inch — no deeper, or the centre will still be wet when the edges are dry.
- OvenPound cake wants 325F. At an inch thick expect 25 to 35 minutes; the top should spring back and a skewer come out clean. A hotter oven crusts the surface before the middle sets.
- Cut cold, and cut cleanThe instruction to cut when cold is not optional — warm pound cake tears and crumbs, and ragged edges will not frost neatly. Chilling the slab for an hour first gives cleaner cuts with a long serrated knife.
- The icing has to set hardFor the pieces to stack without sliding, the frosting needs to be a stiff sugar icing that skins over quickly, not a soft buttercream. Assemble while the surface is tacky, as the recipe says, so each layer glues to the one below.
- The bouquetIf you crown it with real flowers, use unsprayed, food-safe blooms and keep stems and foliage off the icing; many common florist's flowers are not edible.
Pound cake is named for its formula rather than its shape — a pound of each of four things, a ratio old enough and simple enough to be carried in the head, which is why it turns up in nearly every nineteenth-century American cookbook. What makes this version of the period is the architecture: The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the era of the ornamental supper table, when cake was expected to be built as well as baked, and confectioners' manuals of the 1870s and 1880s are full of pyramids, towers and set pieces assembled from frosted blocks and crowned with flowers. Cutting a flat sheet into uniform bars and stacking them in diminishing circles was the domestic cook's route to the same effect without a professional's moulds. The attribution to Mrs. Dr. Thompson — the wife identified by her husband's title — is characteristic of these community-contributed collections, where recipes travelled with the name of the woman known for them.