Perfect Pound Cake with Sugar Glaze Recipe

Perfect Pound Cake with Sugar Glaze Recipe bettyskitchen Hi I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today we’re making pound cake and I’m going to have a nice glaze for the top of it, a sugar glaze which is a really sweet glaze maybe powdered sugar so let’s get started on the cake. This was actually a request from one of my viewers and it’s been at least a week I think since it was requested and I kept saying I’ll get to it and this is the first chance I have to do it so I hope you’ll enjoy it. We’re going to start by putting some butter into a large mixing bowl and this is butter at room temperature 1 stick that’s a half cup and then you want more shortening in addition to that butter and you can choose whatever you like. If you like oil or margarine, Crisco anything like that you need an equal amount ½ cup and I chose this blended oil. It has canola oil and vegetable oil so you could use just vegetable oil alone or canola oil alone whatever you like ½ cup. So those 2 are going together into the bowl. To that I’m going to be adding some granulated sugar so you can see next along the line I have my sugar. I have 2 cups and what I want to do is to blend this with a mixer make mixer get it all blended so this is going to make some noise. Let me go away and get it blended and come back to you. Next step is to beat in 4 eggs 1 egg at a time so I’ll be cracking the egg and putting it in. if you have any problems with your eggs. You crack them into a little bowl and examine them and put them in. Ours come so free disease and anything like that but I could just crack them in and not worry about them but what I’m going to do is to use a mixer to beat this and then I will do that for the other 3 so when I come back I’ll have 4 eggs beaten in one at a time. The batter is coming along nicely. It’s looking good and the next thing that we do is to combine 3 cups of self rising flour into the mixture along with 1 cup of butter milk. Now I don’t normally keep butter milk in my refrigerator because we just don’t use it that often and it would only be if I have buttermilk biscuits to make or something like that that I would want it but I always keep this in my pancake. It is a mix that allows you to make buttermilk on demand. You put 4 tablespoons of this mixture. You see it’s powdery with 1 cup of water. Mix it around and you got buttermilk. It works just as well as the regular buttermilk so we’ll be adding alternately we’ll be adding some buttermilk and some of the flour. I’ll start with this 1 cup and this is 2 cups and 1 cup altogether it’s 3 cups. Now I’m going to mix this with a spoon and if I should need the mixer to speed things up or to make the batter nicer use it. But when I come back I will have alternatively or excuse me, alternately put in buttermilk and flour and continue to mix this butter so I’ll see you back in a minute. I think it’s almost ready to go in the oven. You could see I’ve poured the batter in here. I want to tell you I did add 2 flavors to the batter. Those are already in there. This is pure lemon extract. I put 2 teaspoons of that in and this is imitation almond flavor. I would rather have had almond extract but I didn’t have that in my pantry so we have 1 teaspoon of almond flavor or almond extract so we’re going to use that. Now here’s a little trick I’m going to do that I showed you as a quick tip. You might have seen it. I’m going to take an almond. This is just your regular almond whole and I’m going to stick it in there and measure it down a little bit so that it’s kind of halfway down at some position so that will just go ahead and bake away in the oven and the cake will rise up and they will get it out of the oven after about an hour at 350 degrees and then when we get ready we’re going to glaze it but when we get ready to serve it then we’re going to be slicing pieces whoever gets the piece with the almond has good luck. I do want to say this is not for children because the almond choke them so you could substitute a raisin if children are involved but it is just for adults or friend getting together for a party or for a meal then you can use the almond trick which is a more standard so let’s put this in the oven and I’ll see you back after it’s done. My pound cake is done cooking for a total of 1 hour and 5 minutes and it’s coming out of the oven and I want to show you here that your test for doneness is to take a toothpick and put it toward the center in a deep place and it should come out clean and it does. I just put it out of the oven and put it on the counter and let it cool. Once it is cool to lukewarm then I can ice it. I have my pound cake cooling down for a few hours maybe 3 or so and it has just a little warmth on the bottom very little so I think I get it out of the pan. I have not touched it yet but I’m taking a very thin knife and going around the edge and actually it feels pretty lose around the edge so I hope that’s a good sign. You need to go around the center. Okay I hope this is ready. Yeah nice and easy, there you go I don’t even have to touch the plate. I think I could just turn it. So we have a beautiful pound cake and if you want to just leave it like that that’s fine. I like a little bit of icing or glaze and I’ve decided on the sugar glaze for this one. For the sugar glaze I’m going to take a mixing bowl and we’re going to take 2 cups of confectioners sugar and I’ll put the 2 cups in the bowl and to that we need to add about 3 tablespoons but this one I just wanted it to become a sugar glaze. I’m using water. That’s the easiest thing to do but if you want a little bit of orange flavor or something orange juice is great anything you want. So we’ll just add that in carefully and then mix around. So this looks like glazing consistency. You might notice that I have some water sitting here that was in case it looked too thick to me and actually it did not look too thick it was actually too thin and I ended up putting an extra half cup of confection sugar in so this is actually 2-1/2 cups of confection sugar with 3 tablespoons of water and that seem to make a nice consistency for me so whatever works for you is what you should use. Now for glazing this let’s just put on the center and kind of pour this out and you can make whatever design that you like but I certainly like to have a little bit that is dribbling either down the inside or down the outside so let me come close to the edge so it can dribble so I decided to use pretty much all of this. You can use as little or as much of it as you like and I got pretty full coverage because I really like that glaze but you can let it dribble over the side on the outside and on the inside, however you like to do it. Now what we do is let it sit for a while on the counter and then we need to cut it into wedges and I like to use an electric knife because it makes it so smooth so I will probably serve a piece up and let you see it and we might be lucky enough to get that almond. My glaze is set up on my pound cake and you can always test for that by just putting your hand in a place that’s not very obvious and then it should come out clean. It shouldn’t have the glaze stick to it. So I have cut a piece of the pound cake to let you see what it looks like. You’ll notice that it’s very smooth and consistent on both sides here. This is nice sugary glaze which you may leave up entirely if you like too. If you decide to serve this mid afternoon a nice cup of coffee with it is great. I think you’re going to love this recipe.