How to Make Any Kind of Pound Cake | Off-Script with Sohla

camera a here's rolling b is rolling if we could get clementine and vito to hold some cameras we could have c and d too okay all right tech support hello today on off script with sola i'm going to show you how to take pound cake off script we're going to start with a basic vanilla pound cake then i'm going to show you how to turn it into this nice black and white swirl and once you get the basic concept you can take it off script and do whatever you want matcha chocolate pound cake strawberry swirl pound cake blueberry crumb pound cake anything can be a pound cake clem is really interested in what's going on today so you're going to be hearing her trying to get my attention but you know what that's part of having a dog around so stay tuned to see how i take poundcakes off script and be sure to like and subscribe so you can see more oscar pizzola first thing when you're making pound cake is you want to always use a metal pan metal conducts heat faster than glass so what happens is when this goes into the oven that first hit of heat is going to help your pound cake rise and if you use a glass loaf tin what happens is it conducts heat a little bit slowly slowly so you don't get that big punch of heat that helps it poof in the beginning and you'll end up with a denser pound cake that can often be a little bit greasy even sometimes you'll notice when you bake your cake in a metal pan it even like shrinks a little bit and that's just because the heat's not getting to it as fast go metal or don't even bother bother metal or bust i don't even know why they sell glass pans don't use you shouldn't use a glass pan for anything right nothing maybe maybe an ice cream cake but not for baking now one thing i noticed interesting on the internet nine by five can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so technically on the internets they say that these are both nine by fives but as you can see this one fits inside this one so i want to make sure that you can make this work with whatever nine by five you have so i scaled it to fit in a smaller one so if you have a bigger nine by five it'll be a little shorter but it'll be okay i'm gonna grease my loaf pan with some softened butter i'm using a full tablespoon i like to use softened butter because then you get a nice thick layer nice thick layer i use my hands so you don't lose any butter to the paper towel and it also helps you get it to get into every corner make sure it's really well greased i don't like to line my pound cake with any parchment because i really want the cake to have contact with the pan because my favorite part of pound cake is that dark crust you know you want a nice thick golden crust so using a metal cake pin and using a load of butter and really take your time grease it up look at that this is a serious layer of butter you want to take this off script you could do a snickerdoodle loaf cake and cover the outside with cinnamon sugar whoa maybe add a cinnamon sugar swirl whoa i'm going to start by showing a very simple vanilla pound cake so the basic things in here butter eggs sour cream sugar flour vanilla that's really it the most important thing here is you need to make sure all of your ingredients are at room temperature this is vital vital my butter is at room temperature my eggs are at room temperature my sour cream is at room temperature i worked for a guy who would even um he was an amazing pastry chef and he would actually temp his flour because when you work in a pastry kitchen you usually start your day at like 4 a.m in the winter it's super cold and your flower is going to be super cold so if you live somewhere where it's really cold and you're baking it warm up your flour it'll make a big difference i know it sounds nuts but yeah he would put it in like a sous-vide bag and circulate the flour to just bring it up to like 72 degrees i don't know seems crazy but his his pastries were still some of the best i've ever had so my favorite way to bring all my ingredients to room temperature is i take it all out the night before sorry clementine come here come here clem you want to be in the show it's like when you dangle keys in front of a kid get a few jumps in her wear her out it works really well all right so my favorite way to bring my ingredients to room temperature is i just pull everything out the night before um i know that like some people worry about eggs and butter at room temperature i don't i just have cartons of eggs out all the time because i'm always baking oh she got it no clementine if you don't feel comfortable with leaving all of your stuff out or if you just forgot um an easy way to bring your eggs up to room temperature is i like to put them in a bowl of warm water just like warm tap water just for a few minutes and that'll bring it up gently for my butter you can pop it in the microwave just 5-10 seconds at a time keep checking on it if you just let it go for 15 it'll just melt on you so instead what i do is i'll do like five seconds i do it while it's still in the stick five seconds rotate it five seconds rotate it just keep poking it you wanna make sure it's like flexible so here this is my softened butter it is still whole it hasn't like melted but it's like really soft see see i can just smoosh it around you getting in there whoa softened butter it's flexible it's pliable it doesn't it holds its shape it's not melty it's on a pile of mush this is gonna make sure that we get a lot of volume same thing with your sour cream if you forgot to take it out or if you don't feel comfortable leaving it just pop it in the microwave every five seconds give it a stir it shouldn't take more than like 20 seconds but you just want to get it to the point where if you stick your finger in it it feels like nothing like neutral does that make sense so why is this so important well when you're making a cake batter it's really what you're making is an emulsion basically these things don't want to be together you know fat butter is mostly fat eggs are mostly water those two things they don't mesh but having it at the same temperature and mixing it correctly will ensure that we have a smooth emulsified batter if you don't have an emulsified batter it's gonna look curdled and like like broken it'll look like scrambled eggs and if you bake a cake that with batter that looks like that it comes up coming off a little bit dry and tough and it doesn't get the same amount of volume sometimes it can be greasy so just make sure everything's at room temp the reason why we need this to be soft but not melted is because at this texture it's going to cream up and get super fluffy and give our cake lots of nice volume so yeah room temperature you know all you got to do is take it out and forget about it for a while and it'll be fine so i'm starting out here with 14 tablespoons of butter i'm gonna add some sugar and then half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of baking powder i really like to put my baking powder in when i'm creaming just to make sure it's really evenly mixed i know a lot of recipes tell you just add it in the dry but uh you know i think this way it just really it really incorporates why put it in with the dry it'll be okay it'll be okay with the wet all right paddle attachment and we cream we are looking for it to get really light in color and really fluffy i think most people under cream i'm going to show you where most people stop and then we're going to take it further and you're going to see an amazing difference this begins okay now this is where i think most people stop sure it looks creamy things have come together but look at how heavy and dense that is this is nowhere near fluffy and light that's why it's really important to keep going and always always stop the mixer scrape the paddle scrape the bowl i'm going to do this over and over again this is really the secret between having a good pound cake and a great pound cake you got to stop the mixer scrape the paddle scrape the bowl see how careful i'm being i'm getting every little bit makes a really big difference because you can have really nice light light fluffy butter down here and then like a chunk of uncreamed butter stuck to your paddle that ends up in your batter and then that causes something called a butter bomb it's very noticeable when you make uh muffins but if you have a chunk of butter like that what will happen is part of your batter is just gonna like explode your muffins gonna just pop right out of the tin it's really really sad very upsetting so i'm scraping i'm like really when i say scrape i'm like really getting in there getting in the bottom getting in there so to minimize mess i like to have one corner of my bowl where i do my wiping and every time i'm going to come back and do my little wipey wipe there it might seem like a bit much but you got to touch the rim of the bowl when you're squishing it to fit it back so it's nice to have one area that's dirty so you don't constantly get your hands dirty we're still creaming we're still creaming we're nowhere near being done framing okay again we're not done yet this can get even fluffier but i'm stopping to scrape the paddle here check this out see it's like light and fluffy here and then see there it's a little it looks a little bit dense in color um that's because this part hasn't like gotten enough action and that's what's gonna create a tunnel in your cake so that's why you gotta stop scrape even if you have windows paddle attachment that have a scraper you still have to scrape the paddle you still you still have to do this okay now i want you to take a look maybe we can get like a side by side of this versus the first time i lifted up the paddle i feel like there's a huge difference this looks so light the color it's almost white you know when we were looking at it before it was more of a more of a yellow this is almost white so the reason we took so much time to make sure our butter and sugar was totally like fluff city is because that's what's bringing the lift there's some baking powder in there but this creaming step is going to add a lot of volume to our cake once we add the eggs we actually are going to just mix the eggs until they're just combined we're going to add the eggs one at a time because we're making an emulsion and we don't want to overwhelm the fat phase of our emulsion with too much water from our eggs if you whip too long when your eggs are in there it's going to get too much volume and then it's going to poof in the oven and then collapse a pound cake isn't like a super fluffy like cake it has some lightness but it's more tender than anything else so here i have three eggs and one yolk and i'm gonna drop one in at a time it's a little hard to do when they're all in a bowl like this but we're gonna do it just one just one egg yeah we nailed it see how at this point it's like broken and gross looks curdly and it's sliding around in the bowl and kind of wet and now it's starting to get creamy smooth and we have emulsified after each egg get in there scrape the paddle you know what we're doing stop the mixer scrape the paddle scrape the bowl and and what are we doing now what are we doing guys we're scraping the paddle we're scraping the bowl that's that's that's basically today you want to make good pound cake you want to okay i wish we could do this to the theme of that britney spears song you want a hot body you want a maserati it should be like you want a fluffy pancake you want a tender crumb you got a scrape can i say boom if you keep mixing and mixing and it looks like it's never coming together probably what happened was your eggs and your butter weren't at room temperature something was a little bit too cold so if that's the case the thing i recommend is you either just like just let it hang out for a while let it get up to room temperature and then cream it some more or if you're impatient like maybe gently gently hover it over a delicate water bath this is that's a risky move you know but if you feel like you got you can handle it you feel like you've got the skills give it a shot but really the best thing to do is give it a minute to warm up and then get back to mixing last egg going in it looks incorporated to me now guess what we're doing guys do you know what's next do you know what the next step is scraping the paddle i'm scraping the paddle someone's paying attention they're scraping the paddle i'm gonna scrape the bowl too i'm gonna scrape the bowl too you're gonna scrape the pad stop the mixer scrape the paddle scrape the bowl you got a scrape that's it that's all it is now we are alternating our wet and dry on team wet we've got sour cream little vanilla i'm just making the basic vanilla so i've got a little vanilla in my sour cream and flour you want to add mix-ins this is a good place to start if you want to add stuff that's wet like orange or lemon zest i would add that to my wet try a different extract maybe you want to do like a little instant coffee i would put that in here if you're gonna add something that's dry like cocoa powder matcha ground ooh ground earl grey um grout ground freeze dried fruit add it to your flour unless you want to do like a swirl if you're gonna do a swirl then you have to fully finish your batter and then split your batter up and then add stuff to it but if you're not doing a swirl good place to add that stuff is wet stuff here dry stuff there modification yeah if you're doing something where you're going to add like over a quarter cup of dry so if you're going to add like a quarter cup of flour or something like that then i would add just a tablespoon of milk or water to your sour cream to make sure that it is not getting too dry okay so i went off the rails i went off script there why do we alternate our flour and our wet stuff because this is an emulsion we made a really nice perfect emulsion with our butter and our eggs if we overwhelm it with the with the wet stuff right now it'll just break so that's why we're going to alternate i'm going to do half the sour cream half the flour and then repeat and that's how we make sure we keep our stable creamy emulsion in check also remember my sour cream that's at room temp feels like nothing when i stick my finger in there that's what you want i'm gonna mix until combined about 15 seconds then i add my dry about 15 seconds and we repeat and that's our batter that's it guys now i'm gonna just eyeball half the flour i tried this this with um greek yogurt as well it works but the crumb is just a little bit dry and it doesn't keep as well at room temperature if all that you have is greek yogurt it's okay but it's not ideal but if you really just need pound cake and all you have is greek yogurt fine just know it's not the best [Applause] last bit okay and i'm stopping until just everything is just combined my batter is super creamy totally emulsified i'm gonna do a few more mixes by hand now oh and what am i doing i'm scraping the paddle baby you gotta scrape every little bit of batter when when you're when you're working in a bakery it's like you get fired if you don't scrape every little bit this is money this money and in your own home it's money too so scrape i'm gonna get in there and do a final mix just to make sure everything is totally combined that's why i really like to use a very stiff spatula a soft flexible one it's a little bit harder to get in there and just make sure give it a few final mixes by hand if you took it all the way in the mixer it would get over mixed so this is good knock out those big bubbles we don't want big bubbles and pound cake that looks perfect look at how creamy creamy fluffy vanilla e pound cake so because this batter is thick we do have to do a couple of things to make sure it's really settled packed into the tin so we're gonna first plop it in there this thick batter is also perfect for mixing in all kinds of things like chocolate chips or nuts or dried fruit because it is so thick it won't sink it'll stay evenly distributed which is a really cool thing all right now we're going to use our offset spatula get it kind of flat level it out give it a couple whoa did it splatter on my face a couple swift taps just to make sure we're getting into those corners and this is a cool trick i learned from the internet because i kept having a few pockets here and there so take your spatula and just get in there and do some swirling and this is just going to make sure that if there's any big pockets that haven't had the batter get in there it will get in there so even though this is just one batter i'm not like trying to make a swirl this motion is just to help distribute the batter really evenly and make sure it's nicely packed in there now i'm gonna level it off take a sec here make it pretty okay now this is a really cool trick so when the pound cake rises it's going to crack but if you want to make sure it has a nice crack down the middle wet your knife and then give it a quick score my spatula is nice and wet i'm just going to go in there and boom and that's going to make sure that our our pound cake rises right in the middle just where we want it and then just a little final touch just clean up those edges and that's good to go basic your go-to best ever pound cake all right i'm gonna bake this at 350 for about 60 to 70 minutes it's going to get a really dark crust don't worry this is one of those cakes that it's super super moist so if in doubt bake it a little bit longer because the last thing you want is for it to be under baked because it is so thick of a batter and so dense it takes a long time to bake if it's starting to look like it's getting too dark i always have right now in my oven i have a rack at the bottom third where i'm going to put the cake in and i have a rack set up at the top so if it starts to look like it's getting too dark in the middle of the cooking i'll just pop a sheet tray on the top rack to provide like a little bit of a shield to allow the cake to continue cooking without getting too dark on top my vanilla pound cake is out of the oven it's a nice dark golden crust which is exactly what you want to see i've let it rest in the pan for about like 10-15 minutes and now i'm going to tip it out it should be pretty loose but we're gonna run a spatula around the edges just to make sure so it doesn't get stuck but i can feel it it's like ready to come out because we greased it up really nice with that thick layer of softened soft tint bouter all right this is kind of hard because it's hot i have no more feeling in my hands or in my heart but if you still do you'll need to use a towel but whoo look at that oh she's a warm one i like to pop it out and let it cool completely before you cut into it because stuff's still happening in here you know the crumb is still setting so don't be impatient take your time nail the vanilla pound cake understand how to cream make sure your butter's at room temperature figure out how to temper your eggs once you've crushed that the options are pretty much endless you can you can do a strawberry swirl you can put you can put blueberries and streusel in there you can do a matcha chip i'm going to show you how to do a nice black and white pound cake i'm going to start by making a simple streusel so this crumb is going to go in the middle and on top so we get a lot of texture i'm using black cocoa today i love black cocoa some people hate it i absolutely love it it is it's just cocoa powder that's been heavily heavily alkalized it makes things taste like oreos it makes things super black and you don't need a lot of it we're not putting that much in here and it's going to make this intensely chocolatey if you don't have this you can totally use natural cocoa or dutch cocoa but it's going to be lighter in color but this is going to give us that really nice dramatic stark black and white situation all right so let's make our streusel in here i've got some flour i'm going to add three quarters of a teaspoon of kosher salt boop boop seems like a lot of salt but coco can take it it's going to help balance that bitter flavor i'm going to do a little bit of light brown sugar feel free to use dark brown if that's what you have you can't always substitute light and brown but here it's okay because we are not dealing with any leavening streusel is basically like a shortbread it's almost like equal parts of flour fat sugar if you start with that ratio and then tweak you can kind of come up with your own streusel topping this is like a little bit tweaked from that og streusel ratio but you're going to whisk up your dry or you know what who cares we don't need a whisk we don't need a whisk i'm just going to use my hand get in there make sure that those brown sugar clumps are broken up and everything is evenly mixed you can also do this in a food processor but it's such an easy thing to just do by hand i don't bother streusel is a really fun thing to play around with you can just eyeball it the main thing to remember is don't overdo it on the fat or the sugar because it's going to just and just like you need it needs to be a little bit dry okay so that's like nicely mixed up now i'm going to add some butter and you can use a pastry cutter or a couple of knives or some forks but i just go in there with my fingers until you get the butters like in nice little pebbles running throughout and you get some nice clumpies okay so this is how i like my streusel it's clumps together when you hold it but then it easily just like crumbles apart that's the way i like it some people like a little wetter than that but you know just do whatever however you like it i like this kind because it's really crumbly when you eat it which is exactly what i want so here i've got another batch of pound cake batter made exactly the same way exactly the same way as the last one now i'm going to split this in half eyeball this you don't really don't really have to be too precious about this it'll be okay set that aside that's going to be my the white side of my black and white pound cake for the rest of this i'm going to add three tablespoons of cocoa and a tablespoon of water and mix that up this is why i love black cocoa it is black black as night black is my soul look at that lovely even though we added something really dry because we threw in a tablespoon of water it's gonna have the same consistency so we don't have to worry about it drying out our cake if you've got a little coffee left over that's even better just if you happen to have a tablespoon of coffee don't go making coffee but if you've got it it really brings out the chocolaty bitter notes so that is nicely evenly mixed this is where it gets fun we got our buttered loaf tin so we're going to do some alternating dollops we're going to do about like half we're going to start with half of the whites half of our vanilla dollop dollop cool i'm not being too precious about it it'll be okay it's just gonna all swirl together and it'll look great now let's do half of our black cocoa batter that feels good to me a little another dollop okay cool cool easy so far we're gonna tap this down and then i'm gonna add half of my streusel onto here i'm gonna clump it up in my hand and then break it apart look at those chunkies this is how i like my strews oh yeah now we're going to repeat more alternating dollops it's going to look really cool when you swirl it together the first time i did this and i cut into it i was really impressed every slice kind of looks like a rorschach test is that how you say it is that how you say it yeah i don't know i'm not good with words that aren't food words and even then i'm not really good at it we finished with our black cocoa batter okay boom so tap the top up smooth it out and i'm gonna get in there just like before and swirl this time it's gonna do something more than just compact the batter into the pan and like don't be afraid really get in there and swirl you know even it out at the top and then we are going to do our final slice through the top before we add our crumb same deal i'm going to make some big clumps and then let them break onto big chunks i mean this is just how i like it if you like if you like less streusel or you prefer it to be less dry just add another tablespoon of butter but streusel is one of those really really forgiving things that you can really adjust it to your taste we're not stingy with our strews okay gently tap it in and there you go variation easy easy crushed it i'm gonna make this at 350 degrees 60 to 70 minutes now because we've got black cocoa here it's really hard to tell from the outside if it's done so you got to go with the poke test you want to smoosh your cake just like that and you'll feel it especially because it's going to crack like that if it looks wet in there you know you know it's not done and when you press it if it's done it'll bounce right back if it's not done it'll kind of your fingerprint will stay so use those cues i know there's a lot of streusel on top but it's going to crack and then you'll get a good idea of what's have what's happening on the inside this is also more likely to get a little bit too brown so check on it after like 35 minutes and see if you need to put like a sheet tray shield on the top [Music] layer ah wow wow some gorgeous boulders of streusel look that's how i like my streusel so this is our black and white swirl pound cake and i and i guess we should just get in there right we should we should cut it up okay it's still a little warm and you should wait but you know where we got things to do we got places to be we're gonna get in there okay this is the best part all right let's see how that cross section came out let's see our swirl oh yeah okay this is the moment of truth you ready do it that's a good swirl that's a good swirl because we took our time and had a really nicely emulsified cake batter you can mess around you can get in there with mix-ins and it's not gonna it's not gonna get tough it's not gonna get over mixed because you have a nice emulsified batter and that protects the gluten from like over developing and look at it all paid off a little bit of work in the beginning and you get a lot of fun at the end um i love how black it stays it's super super dark even though we didn't put a ton of cocoa in there and that's because of the black cocoa i love my boulders of streusel it's nice and bitter not too sweet at all success let's take a look at our vanilla okay so for me the epitome of pound cake is sara lee i grew up on that stuff so i like a really tight crumb really tender and that's what my goal was when i was making this so i think we did it guys i think we freaking did that actually this is under baked no you know i have a really our oven is terrible our oven is terrible sometimes it just goes down to like 20 degrees at least at least we had one success so this is our blueberry crumb so you might notice that uh every single pound cake is slightly different and that's kind of like how i roll with the recipes oh hello that's the dishwasher making some noise what a crumb we didn't do anything funny like uh like um add flour to the berries or anything like that and they're still like suspended because it's such a thick batter so that's like the benefit of this batter you can really you can really um load it up with stuff i did a strawberry swirl pound cake exactly the same thing i split the batter but instead of cocoa i added some ground up freeze-dried strawberries and just a touch of red food coloring to make it a little bit more pink and then swirled it with jam oh delightful oh huh got little pockets of jam a little strawberry swirl hi clementine she's here and she's being quiet okay so this is our matcha chip cross section here we go nice tight moist crumb the matcha adds some bitterness which is really nice with our dark chocolate bits in there i think this is our real winner of the day though huh these pound cakes tightly wrapped keep at room temperature for about a week but i really like to eat them frozen tightly wrapped you can have them in the freezer for like three months and they're super delicious and i really like how the crust gets a little bit sticky and jammy just like just like that pound cake nobody doesn't like which was the inspiration for these so learn the basic vanilla pound cake go for the swirl and then take it off script show me how you like to risk on this recipe be sure to like and subscribe so you can see how i take more recipes off script here on off script with sola nailed it what's that [Music] you

Channel: Food52

Views: 525,240

Rating: 4.9436164 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, sohla el-waylly, off script with sohla, pound cake, pound cake recipe, blueberry crumble cake, swirl cake recipe, perfect swirl cake, black and white cookies, black and white cake recipe, black cocoa powder recipes, strawberry swirl cake, sohla pound cake, blueberry pound cake recipe, ham cam, how to fix my pound cake, better pound cake, butter pound cake recipe, vanilla pound cake recipe

Id: ODFho7KaDbY

Length: 32min 7sec (1927 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/flouronmypjs]

I love this series. Teaching the foundation of how to make a dish that can then be customized makes a lot of sense.

[u/serialragequitter]

i love all the little explanations she provides, like the one about creaming your butter properly, or why you have to alternate the wet/dry ingredients. it's these details that go a long way to showing how you can follow the recipe to letter, but still end up with an inedible disaster

[u/Albangla]

Every video is a small cookbook, I love it!

[u/notyourtypicalKaren]

Yessss I love poundcake. My grandma died before I could learn her secrets so I'm excited to learn from Sohla!

[u/Lokaji]

That black cocoa powder looks divine.

Pound cake is a great make ahead dessert. In the before times, I would keep one in the freezer and defrost it if someone came over.

[u/toxic-miasma]

...do y'all think I can manage that level of creaming with a hand mixer before my wrist falls off? I envy how easy everything looks with a stand mixer.

[u/samaira-]

I will definitely try one of these this weekend

[u/desolee]

I rewatched her cover of Work Bitch several times. Comedy queen.

[u/Snoo14215]

Does anyone know how hard in advance these videos are filmed? She almost seems to be responding to the latest.