By Stacey Little Southern Bite

I just love a pound cake. There’s something magical about the simplicity of a perfectly baked, deliciously flavored pound cake. But I love really simple things like that. My family often jokingly calls me the “Mayor of Vanillatown” because of my love of simple flavors. No offense to the Mayor of Flavortown, Mr. Guy Fieri.

The name pound cake comes from the fact that the original recipe, thought to be northern European, contained a pound each of butter, flour, sugar and eggs. Fortunately, we’ve since adapted the recipe a bit.

When it comes to making pound cake, there are two major issues, from my perspective.

The ratios of fat to flour to sugar remain relatively the same, but variations on ingredients range from butter to shortening to cream cheese to sour cream and milk to buttermilk to water – they’re all over the place. And that’s OK, for the most part. It’s one of those things where you just have to decide what tastes like pound cake to you and realize that each ingredient presents certain challenges and advantages.

The other issue with making pound cake is the relatively high margin of error. For me, this is the big one.

Any number of these things can derail your pound cake plans. It can really make your head spin. So it’s important to have a reliable recipe that is detailed enough to get you through the sticky parts but also not so verbose that it’s intimidating.

I’m hoping you’re going to find this recipe just that.

We’ve worked for weeks to get this one right. Testing cake after cake. Variation after variation. To get it to the point where we feel it needs to be. I think we made about eight different versions.

But I’m just going to be honest with you. They don’t always turn out perfectly. We operate in a pretty controlled environment and have some serious recipe development experience under our belts, but things don’t always turn out as planned.

In fact, we had a little trouble getting this cake to release from the pan. We tried all types of Bundt pans, from brand-new nonstick pans to 30-year-old pans from my grandmother. We tested every tip, trick and suggestion out there. We used baking spray with flour, shortening and flour, shortening and sugar, butter and flour, even cake goop (a homemade cake release).

In our testing, we found the newer pan that was greased with shortening and flour offered the best results. While the grease-and-flour method has produced similar positive results in the past for us, I usually have better results with cake releasing from the antique pans over the new ones.

I’ve been racking my brain as to why this is the case but can’t seem to be able to put my finger on it.

Regardless, I’ve made quite a few pound cakes in my day, so here are my tips for getting your pound cake to turn out perfectly every time.

This recipe originally appeared on SouthernBite.com. For more great recipes, visit the website or check out ”The Southern Bite Cookbook.”

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