Buttermilk Pound Cake

Desserts don't always have to be elaborate or complicated.  Sometimes classics like a good vanilla pound cake are enough to make everyone happy.  Who doesn't like pound cake?  This pound cake is just right - not too dry, not too moist; not too light, not too dense.  It's right in between, and perfect when served with a scoop of your favorite ice cream on top.  


Buttermilk Pound Cake adapted from Alton Brown
Ingredients:       *the measurements below are by weight, not volume
6 ounces unsalted butter, softened (+ more for greasing pan)
8 ounces* cake flour
8 ounces* sugar
2 large eggs, room temp
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp almond extract (optional)
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
1/2 cup buttermilk, well shaken


Preheat to 375 F.  Grease a loaf pan with butter and coat in flour (I used a 9x5x3 loaf pan but a 8.5x4.5x2.5 would be ok).  
In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together on medium until mixture is very fluffy and very light in color (about 6 minutes!).  With mixer on low, add eggs one at a time.  Mix for 1.5 minutes.  Add vanilla and salt and continue to beat for 30 seconds.
With mixer on low, add flour and buttermilk alternately, beginning and ending with flour.  After the last of the flour is added, beat for 30 seconds on medium.
Spread batter into the prepared loaf pan and smooth it out using a spatula. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until the crust is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  Allow to cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes and then invert and remove from the pan to cool completely on a wire rack.  

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Sweet Potato Bread with Cinnamon Glaze

Besides terrible, terrible (terrrrrrrrrible) allergies, this time of year is pretty great. The semester is rapidly coming to a close, its bathing suit weather again, and today is my wonderful fiance's birthday! The one thing that isn't so great about this time of year (besides the horrendous mind-bogglingly debilitating seasonal allergies. Spite you, tree pollen.) is the un-availability of yummy fallish ingredients. I searched and searched for canned sweet potato! But it was nowhere to be found. I thought of Pumpkin as a yummy substitute but that is out of season and nowhere here in Florida at the moment either. Not really having enough time to think about how to buy sweet potatoes and make them on my own, I bought a can of Bruce's Yams in Syrup, and opted to drain all the syrup from the can. Not really thinking about it, I bought a 15 ounce can (since I planned to halve the recipe and prepare it in a loaf pan).... but straining the syrup from the can left me with less than 15 ounces. Oh well, I had to make due on my tight schedule. I just decreased the amount of all the other ingredients I put in as well. This was kind of a winging-it kind of recipe for me. The only real change, besides messing around with the amounts of ingredients, was to use only cinnamon in the batter instead of all of the spices Melissa called for.



Also, I chose to do a cinnamon confectioner's sugar glaze instead of the Cinnamon-Rum-Orange Glaze the original recipe called for. We aren't big fans of orange and we don't have any rum. My glaze went something like this:
Cinnamon Glaze
3/4 C confectioners sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tblspn butter, room temperature
2-4 tsp hot water
1/2 - 1 tsp vanilla, to taste
Beat all ingredients together until smooth. Pour half of the glaze over the still-warm loaf (I allowed it to cool for 20 minutes before topping with the glaze). Wait about 10 minutes, allowing the glaze to harden slightly, and then pour the remaining glaze over the loaf. This way you get a nice thick layer of the glaze. I used a pastry brush and painted the glaze on to the sides of the loaf as well.





The result was quite good, considering all the estimating I did with the ingredients. The bread was very moist and not too sweet. The spicy cinnamony glaze's sweetness complementing the bread nicely. I bet this would be good with whole wheat flour too.


Breakfast for the birthday boy... he got his tradition b-day breakfast, cinnamon buns, yesterday :)

Be sure to visit the SMS Blogroll to see how this one turned out for the other members. And see the host, Lorelei's blog - Mermaid Sweets, for this week's recipe.

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