Love To Whisk It!: January 2014

Happy New Year! Hope y'all are doing well so far this year. This year is looking to be one of exciting things for my family.

Time for the Cake Slice Bakers to reveal the cake baked for January! We are baking from Great Cakes by Carole Walter. The cake for January is the Old-Fashioned Pound Cake. There are several variations given in the cookbook and I decided to go the 'Spirited' route with our pound cake. I also added a butter vanilla glaze to the pound cake.

My sous-chef Nick is joining me on this bake. I always love to have my boys help out in the kitchen.

The cookbook calls for a parchment lined pan but I seem to be even more old-fashioned... my pound cakes need to have that sugar crust on the outside. So Nick buttered the pan and then coated with sugar.

I don't usually sift my flour. One f the main reasons for sifting in the old days was to make sure there were no foreign objects in the flour. With today's standards we should be pretty safe from finding odd things in our dry goods.

Since Nick was helping I had him "sift" the dry ingredients. It's good practice.

Cream together the butter and sugar, beating until the color has lightened.

Since we chose the "Spirited" cake we added half milk and half bourbon.

Added in half our dry ingredients then the milk/bourbon, followed by the rest of the dry.

This batter comes out very velvety smooth.

Into the prepared pan and baked in a low oven for just over an hour. Out comes a perfectly golden brown cake.

As it sits on the counter and cools can you smell the buttery goodness with a back note of bourbon?

Now prepare the glaze.

Butter Vanilla Glaze ~ melt 1/4 cup salted butter, whisk in 1 cup confectioners' sugar until smooth. Add in 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 1 to 2 tablespoons milk, depending on how thick or thin you want it. Drizzle over your cake a little while before serving.

We found this cake to be quite tasty but did not feel that it was a pound cake. It was light and fluffy with a soft crumb, which is nice but that is not what a pound cake is. I may make this again knowing what it is like but not expecting a pound cake.