Cake Slice Bakers - April 2011: Cold Oven Cream Cheese Pound Cake

Hey everyone! These past couple of weeks have been really special. I want to say about three weeks ago my sister found out that she was finally getting her own horse. It has been her dream to a horse since basically forever and just last Sunday, she feel in love with a horse named Apollo. He is gorgeous and my sister was so happy that she sobbed with happiness for a really, really long time. Also, about two weeks ago I got to attend the Masters with my dad, which was really fun and I enjoyed being there with him and the people watching and the golf watching. It was all just a blast. Now finally, Sunday was prom night for my school, and although I didn’t go to the dance, I went to the school sponsored after prom party which runs from midnight to five in the morning. I don’t know how I managed it, but I stayed up the whole time and played games with friends and ended up winning some really cool prizes.

Speaking of special, lets get on with a very special cake. This month’s cake for the Cake Slice Bakers is the Cold Oven Cream Cheese Pound Cake. This first thing that makes this a special cake is that it is cooked while the oven is preheating. This means that you don’t reheat your oven until the cake is finally made, only once the cake is in the oven, you can heat up the oven.Now, I’m sure that you can probably preheat the oven and then bake the cake, but I’m not positive you’ll get the same results. Second off, this is a very tender cake and it is probably one of the best cakes made from Cake Keeper Cakes, I think. This cake is very moist and a very good mix between light and airy and thick and dense. I can’t really describe it. And the taste is phenomenal. I really wish I had added more lemon zest to it because the lemon flavor wasn’t coming out as much as I’d like, but that’s what you get when you don’t own a zester and you’re trying to zest a lemon with a cheese grater, ha ha. I think it also had to do with the fact that I’ve never really zested anything before and I was just tired of zesting a huge lemon.

This cake also had a nice outer crust to it. I ate the first slice of cake after it had been inverted onto a plate, so I got a lot of crust and it was superb. I like crusts, I don’t know why, I just do. Now it may seem weird to talk about a cake crust, but it’s an important part of the cake. You don’t want a spongy crust because it doesn’t add to the texture of the cake and you don’t want a burnt crust because then no one will want to eat the cake if they take one look at the exterior and thing it’s burnt! This cake had a perfectly crisp crust, golden brown, crust and it defiantly passed the crust test.

Now, I made this cake into a standard loaf pan because I don’t own a bunt pan and I didn’t want a whole bunch of cake because what usually happens is that I end up having to eat most of it because no one else wants to eat my stuff after a day or so. Well, right from the start, I had this dilemma. The recipe called for a 12 cup bunt pan and I had no clue how much my loaf pan could hold, so I tried measuring it and then looking up to see what it’s capacity was, only to find out that I can’t seem to measure a stupid pan. So I poured cups and cups of water into the pan until it was almost filled and this gave me 6 cups, so I assumed that the capacity was 6 cups so I would just have to half the recipe. The only thing is, my fellow Cake Slice Members said that the recipe produced a lot of batter and I would need thee, maybe even four!, loaf pans. So I went with my gut, and divided the recipe by three, better to have a little smaller cake than a tin that’s overflowing with batter. Well after I poured the batter into the pan, I realized I probably could have gone with the half of the recipe, but that’s ok because this was a perfect little pound cake.

This was such a silky smooth batter. I could have eaten the entire batter, uncooked.

I had a little mishap with the cake being stuck to the bottom, but it was easily repairable. Just make sure to flour the greased pan before pouring in the batter.

It was like a cloud on your tongue, so delicious!

Cold Oven Cream Cheese Pound Cake
slightly adapted from Cake Keeper Cakes by Lauren Chattman
makes about 10-12 servings

Ingredients
1 cup cake flour*
½ tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt
5 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
2 2/3 oz. cream cheese, softened (used 1/3 less fat and it didn’t seem to do any harm)
¾ cup + 2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp sugar
2 eggs, room temp.
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest 

Directions

1. Grease a standard loaf pan and dust with flour. Do this because I didn’t use flour and my cake stuck to the bottom a little bit. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt into a medium sized bowl and set aside.
2. Combine the butter, cream cheese, and sugar into a bowl of an electric mixer and cream them together until fluffy. This should take about three minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed.
3. Next, on medium speed, add the eggs in one at a time, scraping the sides of the bowl after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and lemon zest.
4. With the mixer on low, gradually add in the flour mixture, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. After the final addition, mix the batter for 30 seconds, then stop.
5. Add the batter to the loaf pan and set it on the middle rack. Now you can turn on your oven to 325 degrees F. Don’t open the oven door until the cake is fully cooked, about 45 minutes, or until it is lightly browned on top and when a tooth pick is inserted into the middle, it comes out clean.
6. Let the cake cool in it’s pan for 15 minutes before inverting it onto a cooling rack. Let the cake completely cool before slicing. You can keep the cake in an airtight container or wrapped in plastic wrap for up to three days, if it lasts that long.

* To learn how to make your own cake flour go here.

Nutrition Facts
serving size: 1/10

Calories 188.6 Total Fat 7.7 g Saturated Fat 1.1 g Polyunsaturated Fat 0.2 g Monounsaturated Fat 0.4 g Cholesterol 56.0 mg Sodium 156.5 mg Potassium 14.7 mg Total Carbohydrate 27.1 g Dietary Fiber 0.0 g Sugars 18.0 g Protein 2.8 g