Strawberry Pound Cake

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Strawberry season is over halfway gone… can you believe it? We’ve been enjoying all kinds of yummy strawberry goodness, but I have yet to make a strawberry pound cake. I found a bunch of yummy sounding recipes on Pinterest. Some with icing and some without. However most of the strawberry pound cake recipes I found called for sour cream, cream cheese, half and half, or buttermilk. All of those things there is not a dairy free substitute I care for.

I’m not a throw things together and make your own recipe baker.

It’s just not something I’m comfortable doing. I’m like my Momma, I want a recipe to follow. However searching for recipes was getting old. I have two pound cake recipes that are my favorites in my cookbook. I’d already made my cold oven cake for you and it does well if you add peaches or blueberries to it. I decided to try playing with the other recipe as it’s a butter base pound cake and is overall a larger cake. My dear friend Doug Cales gave me his pound cake recipe years ago and it is a safe bet for something amazing to take anywhere. Sweet, light, fluffy, and melt in your mouth good.

I love how big my new tube pan is and it’s perfect for this pound cake recipe because it rises high. However the last cake I made in it was my Cold Oven cake. If you remember from that post it turned out more done than I would have liked it to be. So I asked Momma about it and she mentioned that she has started putting her cakes on a different rack in the oven! I’ve always heard to put them in the middle rack, but Momma read to try putting them on the rack one below the middle rack. So we’re going to try it today and see if that helps this pound cake not get too brown. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.

So what all do I need?

• 2 sticks or 1 cup softened butter or dairy free substitute
• Crisco
• Sugar
• 6 eggs
• all purpose flour
• baking powder
• milk or milk substitute
• strawberry extract
• 1 1/2 cups diced strawberries

Pull out your strawberries and don’t eat all of them as you cut them up!

I chunked up 1 1/2 cups strawberries for this recipe. Granted it was not a level 1/2 cup but in the ballpark of it. I know chunked is not a very descriptive term for how I cut them up. Decide how big you’d like your pieces and go with that. You could slice them thin, dice them small, or do like I did and stick with something in between. I wanted to have nice sized bites of berries throughout my cake. So I tried to cut them decent sized but not huge.

Make sure to pull out your butter so it has plenty of time to warm up to room temperature.

I’m horrible at remembering to put butter out with plenty of time to warm up. I either don’t have enough time or it sits out for far longer than it needed to. However summertime gives you another option if you forget to warm up your butter. I’ve been known to put my butter on the back porch to let the summer heat warm it up faster for me. Just be careful not to forget it out there! And have it covered so no critters end up enjoying your butter.

Once you have your butter to temperature place it in your mixing bowl with 3 cups granulated sugar and 1/2 cup Crisco shortening. If you don’t know the water in your measuring cup trick to get the Crisco out easier then check out my post making Cold Oven cake to see how that works. It makes life so much easier. Then turn it on and beat away. Make sure to stop it and scrape around the sides and bottom so everything gets mixed in well.

Now it’s time to pull out the eggs

You will need 6 large eggs. Make sure to crack them into a bowl and not directly into your batter. Eggshells are a pain to fish out of batter. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each one. There is a common theme with this cake and it’s mix well. Everything needs to be mixed well into the batter.

Now that everything is creamed together it’s time for wet and dry ingredients.

I kept the dry ingredients the same as the recipe I was playing with. There’s no need to mix them together before adding them to the creamed mixture but you can if you’d like to. Add 1 teaspoon baking powder and 3 cups all purpose flour. I add the flour one cup at a time and mix slowly after each one. If you don’t start the mixer slowly after each cup of flour you will fling flour out of the bowl. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl to get all of the flour incorporated into the mixture.

Now you will need to add 3/4 cup milk. I decreased the amount of milk from the original recipe because I was worried the extra liquid in the strawberries would make the batter too wet. We are still dairy free so I use vanilla almond milk but typically I would use regular 2% milk that I keep in the fridge. It’s almost ready! Put in 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 1/4 teaspoon strawberry extract. If you’re feeling adventurous you could increase the amount of strawberry extract. I didn’t want to overpower the cake so I started small with the strawberry extract.

It’s strawberry time!

Pull out the strawberries you cut up earlier. I put 1 cup of berries in the mixing bowl and saved the other 1/2 cup for later. Gently mix or fold the berries into the finished cake batter. You don’t want to smash them to pieces; so if you use your stand mixer you want to have it on the lowest speed and only mix as long as you have to. That’s it! Now you are ready to put it in the pan.

This recipe rises high and will overflow a small bundt pan!

The first time I made this pound cake I did not realize how high it would rise. I put it in my old trusty bundt pan and plopped it in the oven. About 20 minutes later I started smelling something burning. It had risen to the top of my pan and start dripping down the side onto the bottom of the oven! Yikes, what a mess! So from then on I made one large cake and a smaller one as well. My new tube pan holds more than my bundt pan so I don’t need to worry about it overflowing. However use your best judgement with your pan! If you’re worried about it overflowing then grab a smaller pan to use too. You’ll just have to keep an eye on it to see how long it needs to cook.

Pull the Crisco out of your pantry and grease every crack and crevice of your pan. Make sure to cover it good so the cake will not stick to the sides or bottom. It is so frustrating to try turning out a cake only to have it not want to come out. Or have half of it fall out and the other half stay inside. Yes this is from personal experience. Very yummy tasting but huge mess of a cake. Definitely not one I took anywhere to share!

Once you think you’ve got it covered, grab your flour and sprinkle some inside. I use my flour shaker to get the inside circle of the pan. Then turn your pan around so the flour lightly covers the entire pan. Drop that pan on the counter and the extra flour will fall off the sides and bottom. Dump out the extra and see if you have any shiny spots left on your pan. If you look at my picture below I had to add Crisco and flour to the top left and the top of the middle circle because it was shiny and not covered.

Almost time to smell it cooking in your oven!

Pour the batter around so that it covers it somewhat evenly. It will level itself but best to start with some all the way around it. The berries are heavier than the cake batter and will sink to the bottom. Which is fine, however when we eat it it’d be nice to have some throughout the cake. You can coat your strawberries in flour before adding them to the batter to help them not sink as badly. I opted to save 1/2 cup strawberries from earlier to sprinkle on top of the cake. Most of them will sink into the batter as they cook.

By now your oven should be up to temperature and ready to go!

Place the pan in the 325 degree oven on the rack one lower than the middle rack. My cake needed 1 hour and 18 minutes to completely cook. You know your oven best. I started checking my cake after an hour just to make sure it wasn’t cooking too fast. If you had to split this into two pans I would suggest looking at it after 45 minutes just to be on the safe side. The big pan will most likely not be ready yet but the smaller one should be getting close to being done.

I went back and forth about whether to take it out or leave it in. My toothpick came clean everywhere except for one of the large cracks. It had a little batter on it but not much. I didn’t want a dry cake so I pulled it out and I’m glad I did. Once I cut it, it was soft and fluffy but no wet spots.

Resist the urge to dump it out so you can taste it!

It smells amazing but it needs to sit a bit first. Let it sit 15 minutes on a wire rack and then turn it out to finish cooling.

Moment of truth! How did I do?

I was rather nervous at this point. I had two little squirts in the kitchen with me by this point and it smelled really good. However this is not my typical style of baking. I’m a recipe follower. You want something made, I will find you a recipe for it if I don’t have one. I’m not one to just throw things together and try it out. Granted I didn’t just throw things together but doctoring recipes is not something I do very often.

Success! Nice, soft, fluffy cake with berries spread out throughout it. I was pleasantly surprised with my attempt of making my own strawberry pound cake. This recipe is definitely getting written down and saved for later. I hope you like it as much as we do! The original recipe freezes very well so I would imagine that this one would too.