Pound cake: cream cheese vs sour cream vs buttermilk vs heavy cream

[flzhang]

It seems like most pound cakes are very similar except for the type of liquid/cream used. What's your favorite? Which one would give me a nice and moist cake?

Also, can pound cakes be baked in a regular cake pan? I'm thinking of making one for a baked alaska.

[darklyglimmer]

There was a recipe in the NYT a few years ago for a buttermilk pound cake, which I clipped but never made. This blog waxes pretty darn lyrical about it, though.

http://17andbaking.com/2010/04/28/buttermilk-pound-cake/

Original recipe here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/mag...

[Karl S]

Um, butter. Not any other dairy product. Period. If you want to call it pound cake.

[ipsedixit]

Butter.

Everything else is just, well, not pound cake.

[toutefrite]

I have to agree. I tried a recipe with sour cream that looked promising, adn the texture was odd. Some people liked the flavor, but like ipse said, it just wasn't, well, pound cake!

[Hank Hanover]

For 3 of the 4 ingredients, I think you could substitute them for the milk in any recipe or even substitute them for each other. Cream cheese, however, is not a liquid. It is more of a substitute for the butter. Then you are getting into adjusting the basic formula of the cake. It would require a lot of research and experimentation to come up with the proper proportions with cream cheese.

There are probably recipes with cream cheese out there you could try.

[rafjel]

Alice Medrich's pound cake made with kamut flour is very moist; the only added liquid is 3 tbsp. of milk. It calls for an unconventional mixing technique - add the butter and 1/2 the liquid/eggs to the dry ingredients and beat for one minute, then add the rest in two additions, beating for 20 seconds each. It produces a very nice cake - not too dense, but still moist. I imagine you could replace the Kamut flour with all-purpose and it would still be lovely.

[agoodbite]

Call me a purist, even a curmudgeon if you want, but a pound cake was so named because it contains a pound of each of the four basic elements in the recipe: butter, sugar, eggs and flour. There's no liquid and no leavening beyond the eggs added, only a little flavoring. I never needed a cake that big and didn't have a scale when I first started making this style of cake. The recipe I settled on was one for Bishop's Cake that I found in a Louisiana junior league cookbook. It requires half the amount of the basic ingredients with the addition of some vanilla extract and lemon zest and juice, when the mood suits me. The key is to beat the eggs thoroughly into the creamed sugar and butter mixture since that's the only leavening you get. Even still, the crumb is moist and dense. I can't imagine that baking it in anything other than a bundt pan would work, especially for a dessert that's supposed to be as light and airy as a baked alaska. I would consider a spongecake instead.