Grapefruit Pound Cake

Image from Cooking Light, Jan. 2012

Grapefruit. I love grapefruit. Grapefruits are actually hybrids, a cross made between an orange and a pummelo.   I especially love Pink and Ruby grapefruits over the White grapefruit because they are sweeter. The White grapefruit isn't bad, just more tangy and less sweet then the pink/red fleshed grapefruits.  I bought way too many grapefruits so I decided to use some and make a pound cake.   Enjoy this light and tasty recipe.

Ingredients: 2 c flour, 1 tsp baking powder, sea salt, 1 2/3 cups sugar, 6 TBSP butter, 6 oz. cream cheese, 2 eggs*, .25 c canola oil, 2 TBSPs grapefruit rind*, .5 tsp pure vanilla .5 c milk, .5 c fresh grapefruit juice, 1.25 c powdered sugar


Instructions: (1) Preheat oven to 325 and coat a bundt, tube, or bread loaf pan with cooking spray. (2) Measure out flour to roughly 2 cups and level. Combine flour, baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt to a bowl and stir well. (3) Cream sugar, butter, and cream cheese in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Add eggs and mix well. Beat in oil, grapefruit rind, and vanilla.  (4) Add flour mixture and milk to egg mixture alternately, ending with flour mixture. Spoon batter into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour or until toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. Cook on wire rack before inverting. Cool completely. (5) Place grapefruit juice in a saucepan over med-high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce to about 3 TBSP of sauce and cool slightly. Stir in powdered sugar and 1/8 tsp of salt and drizzle over cake.

*Room Temperature eggs work best.
*I usually add more than 2 TBSP of grated grapefruit rind and more grapefruit juice for the icing. I used ruby grapefruits over the white grapefruits.

Almond Pound Cake

The other day while grocery shopping, I passed the bakery section and saw a loaf of Almond Pound Cake and started salivating, you know, the whole Pavlov's dog thing. I haven't had baked goods since the week before Christmas; well, actually, I did break and have a cookie on Christmas day, but still. Lately, I'm starting to crave things like hot fudge sundae's or hot pretzels or a slice of pound cake with a nice lemon icing on top because of the certain foods I'm eating and those I can't eat. I haven't totally caved, but the cravings are still there. So to help overcome this carving for a slice of pound cake, I figured I would bake one. Hopefully just the smell of it baking and maybe, just maybe, a SMALL taste of leftover batter will put the beast to rest. I'm not totally confident that I won't have a piece so this pound cake will be taken to a gathering tonight so I'm not tempted to have a slice with my tea later this evening!

I'm trying out a new recipe I found for Almond Pound Cake. I usually use my Sour Cream Coffee Cake recipe and add things like pure almond extract, almond flour, and almond paste. I wanted to find something similar but doesn't use the sour cream.  I just did an internet search for Almond Pound Cake and read through several before finding one that has ingredients I was looking for. So this is a first time cake and my guinea pigs, I mean, taste testers will have to let me know what they think, since I WON'T be having a slice!

Ingredients: 1.5 c butter, 3 c sugar, 5 eggs*, 2.5 c flour, 2 tsp baking powder, .5 c almond meal*, .25 tsp sea salt, 2 tsp pure almond extract, 1 tsp pure vanilla extract, 2 c milk, .33 c almond slivered

Instructions: (1) Preheat oven to 350 and prepare pan* with either a cooking spray that has flour in it (Baking Joy) or grease and flour the pan. (2) Beat butter until cream them slowly add in sugar. Beat until fluffy. (3) Add eggs to the batter, one at a time. Beat mixture another 2 minutes. (4) In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, salt and almond meal. (5) Add extracts to milk, set aside. (6) On low speed, add a third of the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Beat until incorporated. Add half of the milk mixture to the mixing bowl and incorporate. Continue adding flour then milk then flour until all the flour and milk are incorporated into the mixing bowl. (7) Sprinkle slivered almonds on the bottom of the prepared pan (optional) and then pour batter into the pan. (8) Bake until done, about 55 minutes or until cake tester comes out clean. (9) Cool slightly then invert on cooling rack or pan and cool completely. Frost/glaze after cake is completely cooled.


*Eggs are better at room temperature.
*Bob's Red Mill has an almond meal that can be used. We use it when we make our macarons. If you don't want to pay the price for the almond meal (can be around $11 per bag at a grocery store), you can ground up almonds in a food grinder.
*You can use a bundt pan, a loaf pan, a tube pan, or any pan you want.
*I might top this cake with a almond glaze or a dusting of powdered sugar or serve it plain. All depends on what I feel like doing after the cake cools.

Orange Pecan Spice Pound Cake

Orange Pecan Spice Pound Cake

Pound Cake is a British creation dating back to the early 1700s. It was an easy recipe to remember because there was a pound of butter, sugar, eggs and flour. No leavening agents were used, just air whipped into the batter. This recipe would feed multiple families. During the 1800s, the recipe was tweaked to produce a lighter cake and by the 1900s, leavening agents were used.

Pound Cake is one of those dessert cakes that can be found in a bundt (mini and big) shape, loaf shape, or a tube shape. There are many varieties of pound cake depending on what you are looking for in a recipe. A friend of mine from Georgia makes a killer Pound cake recipe. One year she baked up some for us to take on a research trip to Belize and Guatemala. As she stated, "You can eat some during your flights and save some to throw at the jaguars if they are chasing you!" I was happy when she gave me the recipe before moving to Switzerland. My step-grandfather made a killer Cream Cheese Pound Cake. He was born and bred in Kentucky and this was a recipe he was known for making. He gave my mom the recipe along with the specialized pan he made it in. Not long after getting the recipe, Preston died. In remembering him, my grandmother overheard that he had given my mom the recipe. Gran stated that "not even his daughters have that recipe". This is the recipe we use and sell at the farmer's market in a loaf form but it can also be purchased in big form using the pan Preston used to make it.

I'm on a citrus kick so I decided to make a pound cake with orange in it along with some pecans and some additional spices that I wouldn't use if I was making a normal pound cake. I used a bundt cake pan because this cake is going to a friend's house for a potluck dinner and the bundt pan adds a little decorative touch to the cake. The finished product will be plated, brushed with an orange syrup and garnished with orange and pecan halves around the edge of the cake.

Ingredients: 2 cups finely chopped pecans, 1 lb. butter, softened, 3 c sugar, 6 large eggs, 4 c flour, 1/8 tsp. salt, 3/4 c milk, 2 TBSP. orange zest, 2 tsp. ground cinnamon, 1 tsp. ground nutmeg, 1 tsp. each of pure vanilla, pure lemon, and pure orange extract, 1/2 tsp. ground cloves.

Instructions: (1) Preheat oven to 350. Arrange pecans in a shallow pan and bake 10 minutes or until toasted and fragrant, stir after 5 minutes. (BE CARE THEY BURN QUICKLY). Reduce oven temp to 300. (2) Grease and flour pan or you can grease the pan and use about 1 1/4 c of pecans to coat the bottom and the sides of the pan evenly. This will add a crisp coating to the pound cake. Make sure the pecans are evenly distributed along the bottom of the pan. (3) Beat butter on medium speed until creamy and gradually add in sugar, mixing well. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing until incorporated. (4) Combine flour and salt and add to butter mixture alternatively with milk, beginning and ending with flour. Beat at low speed until blended after each addition. Stir in orange zest, spices, extracts, and remaining pecans. Spoon into prepared pan. (5) Bake at 300 for 1.5 hours or until skewer  comes out clean. Let cool on wire rack for 20 min. Remove cake from pan and invert it so the pecan crust side is up. If you didn't add the pecans during step 2, just invert the cake. Brush orange syrup* along tops and sides and cool for an hour. Plate and garnish and serve.

*Orange Syrup can be brushed along the top and sides of the pound cake several times. To make the syrup you need 1 orange and 1 c sugar. Zest the orange for 2 TBSP and squeeze the orange for 1/2 c of juice. Stir zest, juice and sugar in small saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, for 3 min. or until sugar is dissolved. Increase heat to med-high and bring mixture to boil, stirring constantly, and boil for 3 min. Use immediately on cake. (DON'T POUR SYRUP OVER CAKE!)

**I added more zest because I love that citrus flavor. While making the cake, I don't level off the spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) but use heaping teaspoons.  If I dress up the cake fancy, I'll make crystallized orange peels and glazed pecans. If I don't feel like doing the extra work, I just use raw pecan halves and orange slices.

Under Construction

As most of you know, Bob and I both hold down regular day jobs and have Family Secrets Bakery as a side job. This upcoming week is Spring Break for most school system here in Massachusetts and since I'm not traveling with a group of students outside the country or going to some nice tropical place myself, I'm going to spend some time in the kitchen creating new products.

One of the products we've been working on in our spare time are Lemon Coolers. Over 10 years ago I spend some time in Savannah, Georgia on a National Marine Sanctuaries workshop. While touring the city, I picked up some Key Lime Coolers for my husband. They were amazing. Small circular cookies with an overwhelming flavor of Key Lime dusted off with powdered sugar.  Recently a customer asked if we made Lemon Coolers. At the time we were concentrating on the Oatmeal cookies but we've always talked about adding more than just the oatmeal based cookies to our product line.  I started combing through recipes from my side of the family. These recipes were either passed down or given to my mom at one time or another. For 13 years of my life, my family called Louisiana home.  I might not have been born in the southern state, but this is were I grew up and is what I consider home. It was here that I found a recipe for a powdered sugar cookie. Bob first tried a version and the cookie wasn't what we were looking for. He even added a very lemony frosting to add to the top of the cookies. Though good they weren't perfect. I tried another version. This was a comical adventure. I misread a certain ingredient and ended up adding instead of a tablespoon of lemon juice, I added a cup. This made the dough very watery so I tried to thicken it up by adding more of the dry ingredients. Needless to say I knew defeat when I saw it and tried again with a new batch. The third trial came out better than the first trial but still didn't have that citrus kick we were looking for. So this week, I'm going to re-work the recipe and see if I can get a cookie that is light but full of lemon flavor.

Another recipe I'm going to experiment with will be making a Chocolate Pound Cake. I have two recipes for a pound cake. One of the recipes comes from a family member who lived in Kentucky. As far as I know, my mom and I are the only ones to have this recipe. It is a Cream Cheese Pound Cake recipe. Not as heavy as you would think and is very addicting. It is good by itself or with a little bit of apricot preserves on top. I'm going to play around with this recipe and see what would happen if I add either melted chocolate to the mix or some cocoa powder to the mix.  My husband is a chocoholic and will eat any chocolate in the house. His behavior has been a joke in our house. I'm not real big on chocolate. I'm more of the sugary candy kind of person but I do enjoy a piece of dark or white chocolate every once in a while. Every time I'm in the mood for a piece of chocolate, there isn't any because he's eaten it all. I've had to hide it in order to have it when I want it. Just another chocolate item for those who love chocolate.

Two more recipes I'll try to get to this week will be bread recipes. I love lemon poppy seed muffins so I'll try a lemon poppy seed bread from a recipe I've filed away and kind of forgot about until now. My grandmother has always made a killer banana nut bread. It's very moist and though I have never loved bananas, I love this recipe. I also love coconut so I'm going to try making a tropical bread with both banana and coconut and see what will happen.

So as you can read, this week will be a week of experimenting with flavors and ingredients. Not sure how it will turn out but since I love baking and it is relaxing and I'm on break, why not try! I'll let you know later how this week turns out.