Sterling Pound Cake

Saucyman – Cupcakes come in a cup but Pound Cake doesn’t weigh a pound, please explain? – Metrics

Historically, Pound Cake was produced with a pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs – which actually produced something more akin to a 4 Pound Cake. Also historically, I once told someone at a party a Pound Cake was “A pound of flour; a pound of butter; a pound of sugar; 8 large eggs - which is about a pound and a pound of yeast.” I had a beer in my hand, a smile on my face - I don’t take myself seriously when I say things like that, I have no idea why anyone else would, but the subsequent cell phone call from the grocery store asking if she really needed 32 packets of yeast set off a chain of mutual embarrassment that our acquaintanceship was never able to overcome.

Just for future reference: Saucyman, the internet based food Q & A website, is researched and double-sourced for factual accuracy. The other Saucy-man, me at a party, is not always the most credible source of information - even if the subject is well within my wheelhouse - like baseball statistics, my beloved Blazer’s, what John Kerry should have done differently in 2004 or surprisingly food. Be careful of the circumstances we encounter each other.

Pound Cakes are butter cakes, whose taxonomic genus includes - 1234 Cakes, which consists of 1 C. Butter, 2 C. sugar, 3 C. Flour, 4 Eggs; the French, Quatres-quarts; The German, Sandtorte and the Cupcake. Butter cakes differ from cakey-cakes both in ingredients and technique. A cakey-cake - like a sponge cake, use less butter, more eggs and relies on a matrix of air and protein, usually in the form of whipped eggs to leaven the cake.

Butter cakes are combined in what is called the 'creaming method': Softened butter and sugar are mixed together – this is also how cookies begin their life. This mixing of fat and sweet forms little air bubbles, the addition of chemical leaveners (usually in the form of baking powder), enlarge these nascent bubbles which raise the cake. That’s right, baking powder does not form bubbles, rather expands the bubbles that already exist. This is why adding extra baking powder doesn’t help make things lighter – adding more baking powder will either create big bubbles which detract from the overall texture of cake or worse adding more powder runs the risk of expanding the bubbles until they pop, resulting in something the exact opposite of lighter.

A true Pound Cake, made with equal measurements of the four principal ingredients, would be so dense it would make a Christmassy fruit cake seem like an Angel Food Cake in comparison. The great Rose Levy Beranbaum’s aptly named, The Cake Bible, includes a recipe for ‘Perfect Pound Cake’. Eggs, flour and sugar are called for in equal measures but only in 5.25 ounce increments – making for something more like a 1/3 of a Pound Cake. In this recipe, butter is allotted a superior 6.5 ounces, meaning it would be Prime Minster if the cake were baked in a Parliamentary system.

Although they are relatively cup-shaped, the name Cupcake has nothing to do with their physique – they are more like a wee pound cake, using the diminutive measurement of a cup for the principal ingredients. Doesn’t make them any less good, but does help explain why they are smaller.

Saucyman returns Thursday with an all new post. Next week we will return to our thrice-weekly posting schedule, including Charles Seluzicki’s thoughts on tripe.