Orange-cranberry pound cake. In my kitchen. It’s happening.
Or rather, it happened.
Know what also happened? Rain. RAIN! In December. In Minnesota. Just a few short days before Christmas. What.The.Heck. Why is this happening? Where is the snow?
The forecast says 70% of snow for Tuesday. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a Christmas miracle. I hope you do the same.
While I wait and hope, hope, hope for the snow I will be enjoying this orange-cranberry pound cake.
I haven’t used my bundt pan in what seems like forever and ever and ever, so I decided to take a quick break from the cookie baking and whip up a pound cake.
This pound cake recipe comes from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible (which is full of some killer recipes and awesome baking tips) and is dubbed the “perfect pound cake”. Traditionally pound cakes are equal parts butter, sugar, flour, and eggs; however, this recipe has just a little extra butter giving the cake more of that delicious buttery flavor and some nice, tender crumbs. This pound cake is so moist (I don’t care if you hate that word) and has just the right level of sweetness.
To add a little festive twist, I threw in some orange zest and cranberries. The orange flavor is just barely there in the background and the cranberries give little bursts of tart juices in each bite, along with some beautiful color.
The only thing that would make this cake more delicious is a drizzle of some glaze, because as I mentioned before, it’s not very sweet. Unfortunately I was fresh out of powdered sugar. I am the worst. So please bake this, stir up some powdered sugar and orange juice, drizzle it all over the pound cake, and tell me how it is. Thank you. You’re the best.
Now I am going to go spend the rest of the evening wrapping presents and eating pound cake and watching Christmas movies and drinking hot chocolate and wishing for snow.
I hope you are all ready for Christmas and are able to spend lots of quality time with friends and family over the next few days!
- 3 tablespoons milk
- 3 eggs
- 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
- 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed orange juice
- zest for one orange
- 1 ½ cups cake flour
- ¾ cups sugar
- ¾ teaspoons baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 13 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1 ½ cups fresh cranberries
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a bundt pan and dust with flour.
- In a medium bowl, combine the milk, eggs, vanilla, and orange juice.
- In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Mix on low for 30 seconds.
- Add the orange zest, butter and half of the egg mixture. Mix on low until all the dry ingredients are moistened. Beat for 1 minute on medium.
- Add the remaining egg mixture and beat for 30 seconds.
- Stir in the cranberries.
- Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for 40 minutes or until a toothpick is inserted and comes out clean.
- Let the cake sit in the pan for about 10 minutes before inverting on a rack to cool completely. This is the time you would ideally add the glaze.
PS – Remember when I made these awesome cookies and talked about The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap? Well here are the recipe roundups: part 1 and part 2. Check them out and get baking! So many amazing cookiessss!!!!!
