Sauvingnon blanc Pound cake- the experiment

By Chewy (with remarks in purple by La Confectionista)

      La Confectionista and I are decent cooks and bakers (well she is- I make makes no claim on baking), but no one from the Cordon Bleu has yet to call us to teach a seminar. That being said, we felt an obligation to not just talk the talk but also walk the walk and test out a few recipes that have been posted on this blog. We were both intrigued (by intrigued she means "sugar and booze- hooray!") with the Sauvignon Blanc Pound Cake with Sauvignon Blanc glaze and gathering all the ingredients together, we rallied in my kitchen for the afternoon’s adventure.

       The first thing one MUST do when cooking with wine is open the bottle and taste it! As you have heard me state, and really all great cooks will concur, you cannot cook with wine that you would not drink. So naturally, we poured a glass. Hmmmmm. Not bad. I would drink that. OK. We mustered ourselves for the task at hand. LC decided we didn’t need a printed copy of the recipe because she could bring it up from the blog on her fancy phone. Great, then she leaves for a moment and I am left trying to read tiny print with half century old eyes, a sip of wine under my belt and an arm full of ingredients. In mid sentence the screen goes blank and after setting everything down I touch the screen. Nothing. I push a button. Locked out. I slide a bar. It wants a password. I hide the phone and go downstairs to get the printed copy and check for more Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge just “in case”.

     The Counte (mighty CFO and general objective thinker) notifies us by fancy phone that we need to take photos of the whole process so the staging begins. Fancy phone comes in handy for this so I let it back in the room. Searching for photo worthy bowls, measuring cups and spoons, we organize and position the ingredients. Now, to check again on the wine to make sure it hadn’t gone bad since we opened it. Nope, still good.

     Gets pretty mundane for a while, measure, measure, stir, stir, sip, sip.  And when it came to the ingredients we spared no expense. Organic unsalted butter, organic whole milk, “I would drink it” Sauvignon Blanc, cage free eggs, and all topped off with my home made vanilla extract. Literally every time LC comes to my house, she opens the bottle and smells it with a smile and an “AHHHH!”. So she decides the vanilla extract needs to be taste tested too. Adding a shot to a glass of whole milk, she determines “I would drink it!”.

     Batter is now thoroughly combined and ready for the Bundt pan. I doesn’t own one so LC brought her silicone one and a lengthy conversation ensued regarding whether the size and material would be suitable to the task at hand. (I told her it would be fine) But in the end we greased up the silicone and poured in the aggregate, set the timer and sat down to contemplate the rest of the wine and how much we needed to save for the glaze.

     The recipe called for 65 to 75 minutes to bake after which, one was to stick a long wooden pick into the center to check for doneness. The long wooden sticks were downstairs. But toothpicks were upstairs. Rats! Not long enough. But two of them end to end would work, especially if you taped them together! What do you know, it worked! At least the first couple of times. For whatever reason, and we’ve decided to blame it on the silicone Bundt pan, it took an additional 25 minutes for this to reach acceptable done cake stage. Unfortunately, the last test with improvised “long wooden pick” left one pick and the tape trapped in the cake. Not to worry, we’ll just make it a game and who ever finds it in their piece gets a prize! (for the record I had no idea this was happening until the "oops"...great, who likes scotch tape flavored cake? It could be the next thing, right?)

     On to the glaze! LC insisted on handling this juncture and took the bottle of wine away from me to carefully measure the 2 tablespoons required. Glaze finished and drizzled, we get down to the business of tasting. What a mixed bag of emotions. We were not blown away.  Honestly there was so little wine in the recipe one could barely detect it. And I have had (and made) far better pound cakes. The glaze had a funny taste as well.  We’re  thinking it was the cornstarch from the confectioners sugar. And we did end up finding the toothpick and tape before someone stabbed themselves.(no cake was harmed, though the "search and rescue mission" proved unkind to the look of the cake)  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go finish that bottle of wine before it goes bad.

     Stay tuned for further kitchen escapades as LC and I endeavor to bring you up close and personal experiences from the Hall of Recipes posted right here.

Sauvignon Blanc Pound Cake with Sauvignon Blanc Glaze

Ingredients

Add to Shopping List

2/3 cup milk

1/3 cup Sauvignon Blanc 1 cup butter, softened

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract Sauvignon Blanc Glaze Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 325°. Stir together milk and wine; let stand 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, beat butter at medium speed with a heavy-duty electric stand mixer until creamy. Gradually add sugar, beating at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition.

3. Stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add to butter mixture alternately with milk mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat at low speed just until blended after each addition. Stir in vanilla. Pour batter into a greased and floured 12-cup Bundt pan.

4. Bake at 325° for 1 hour and 5 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes or until a long wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack 10 to 15 minutes; remove from pan to wire rack. Brush or drizzle Sauvignon Blanc Glaze over top and sides of cake. Cool completely (about 1 hour).

Sauvignon Blanc Glaze

 Ingredients

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

2 tablespoons Sauvignon Blanc

1 tablespoon milk

Preparation

Whisk together powdered sugar, Sauvignon Blanc, and milk until smooth.

By Southernliving

Basic Pound Cake Recipe

Servings: 12

Units: US

    1/2 lb flour (any type of white flour)
    1/2 lb egg (weigh eggs with their shells)
    1/2 lb soft butter
    1/2 lb sugar
    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
    1 pinch salt
    2 teaspoons baking powder

Directions:

    1.    Preheat oven to 350°.
    2.    Add all the ingredients to a bowl of a cake mixer.
    3.    Beat on high for 7 minutes.
    4.    Grease a loaf dish.
    5.    Pour cake batter into dish.
    6.    Bake for 65 minutes; check doneness with toothpick or cake tester.
    7.    Allow to cool covered with paper towel for 30 minutes.
    8.    Transfer to cooling rack and allow to cool covered.
    9.    Once cooled, cut into slices and serve.

by Chewy-bacca-nista

A Pound is a Pound is a Pound Cake

     Sitting with my coffee and musing over things that make me go “hmmmmm”, I  mentally flitted around until I landed on Pound Cake. The name conjures a multitude of images. The most practical interpretation  is one of beating this confection into submission before baking (certainly one wouldn’t do it afterward….that would be crumb cake). Perhaps it’s created by the forced labor of poor cats and dogs impounded for roaming the streets and then sold for their upkeep. Could it refer to the British monetary cost of one Pound per cake? Then again it could be a “moment on the lips, a pound on the hips”  visual explanation. Our savvy Sugarmeisters probably already know it’s none of the above. The real account is simple, practical and most important, memorable.

     Once more, we will travel back in time to the early 1700’s. The place is Britain and the need is for cake. Imagine yourself, a typical housewife, trying to put something sweet on the table for the family (of 13) and you’ve misplaced your Betty Crocker Cookbook. Therein lies your first complication, not an abundance of printed cookbooks. Toss in the probability that you don’t read and that makes the last point moot. Reliance on verbally passed down recipes is always dicey. Did Mom say a taste of spice and a gill (an actual measurement of the time) of rosewater or a gill of spice and a taste of rosewater? What was required were simple ingredients, simple measurements for simply delicious. The original recipe contained  one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour. Hence it’s moniker, Pound cake. Now that’s a cake you can live off of for a while or share with the entire shire. Given the sizable cake this made, it’s not surprising that the ingredients were  eventually adjusted to produce a more manageable portion. Easily done with a 1:1:1:1 ratio of the four basic ingredients.

     For fun, or for purists, I am including an original 1747 recipe. Notice that along with Pound cake, this could have been called Hour cake as you were directed to beat (by hand!) for an hour and bake for an hour.

     [1747]
"To make a Pound Cake
Take a Pound of Butter, beat it in an earthen Pan, with your Hand one Way, till it is like a fine thick Cream; then have ready twelve Eggs, but hald the Whites, beat them well, and beat them up with the Butter, a Pound of Flour beat in it, and a Pound of Sugar, and a few Carraways; beat it all well together for an Hour with your Hand, or a great wooden Spoon. Butter a Pan, and put it in and bake it an Hour in a quick Oven. For Change, you may put in a Pound of Currants cleaned wash'd and pick'd."
---The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse, facsimile 1747 London reprint [Prospect Books:Devon] 1995 ( p. 139)


     Over the years, bakers have continued to tinker with the elements of the Pound cake and certainly there are variations internationally. There have been a few additions, vanilla or almond extract, dried fruits, leavening agents such as baking soda or baking powder, and a few substitutions such as vegetable oil or sour cream for the butter. Some of these variations hold very little similarity to the original  taste and texture of yesteryear but still claim the name. There’s no doubt that the Pound cake, dressed up or dressed down, still commands respect and demand to this day.

by Chewy-bacca-nista