Sweet Melissa Sundays–Pound Cake

This Sunday’s Sweet Melissa’s recipe is “Perfect Pound Cake”.

Each Sunday a different blogger bakes a recipe from the cookbook “The Sweet Melissa Baking Book”; the rest of the participants for the group bake the same recipe and then we all post our results and comments. Maybe I have too much time on my hands but I think this will be great fun.

This is my first post to the group and already I’m cheating!! This weekend Tom and I went birding at Chincoteague Island, VA with the VSO ( Virginia Society of Ornithology) and I had to bake the pound cake ahead of time. And, yes, Chincoteague is the site of “Misty of Chincoteague”, a book many of us read as young teenagers.

I baked on Thursday and  followed the recipe very carefully, with just a few changes. First, I like to use vanilla bean paste instead of vanilla extract. It is not really a paste; its more like a syrup. The advantage is there are vanilla bean seeds in the paste. You get the appearance of having used a vanilla bean without the effort of slicing and scraping the bean. I always find dealing with the actual bean too much trouble.

Here are my ingredients:

The batter is very easy to make, you just stir the ingredients together in a bowl, no mixer required.

I also decide to use a decorative pan cake. I do work for Williams-Sonoma and I have way too much equipment in my kitchen. So I used a pan that made 6 small cakes.

The baking time was about 40 minutes, a little less than the recipe. And the result was great:

The pound cake is very tasty. The small cakes were a great snack on our weekend trip.

To see the recipe you can visit the blog of Veggie Num Nums, here is a web address:

http://www.veggienumnums.com/

Eventually I’ll be able to embed links and do much more. But in the meantime enjoy my cooking attempts!