At work, I supervise a team of people, and help to oversee the department. One of the women on my team had requested I make a specific cake for her birthday, since we make baked goods once a month for all the birthdays in the department. The recipe came from her grandmother whom, beyond leading an apparently full life, doesn’t believe in using less than two sticks of butter in any of the recipes I’ve seen her from her. However, she certainly knows what she’s talking about, as this cake is good.

This is much more dense and rich version of a pound cake. It has cream cheese in it, which I was skeptical about at first, but I have to admit that now I probably won’t make a regular pound cake again.

I pretty much followed this recipe to the letter, although I did omit the baking powder, as I prefer to use cake flour when baking.

This is the recipe, copied directly from her email:

2 sticks of soft butter
8oz cream cheese (get regular not that whipped or lite cream cheese) [I love this! The other recipe I have from her also has a similar parenthetical scolding about using anything less than real butter.]
3 cups of sugar
6 eggs
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 level teaspoon of baking powder
2 – 3 teaspoons of whatever flavoring you prefer. [I split my batter into three batches, and used roughly about a teaspoon of vanilla, lemon and almond extract for the divided batter.]

Preheat oven to 350, and grease your baking pan (or use the Pam spray with flour, which I love). I chose to make cupcakes the second time I made this recipe, mostly because I find it easier to transport cupcakes to work than cake.

Cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar together. Thank your co-workers for getting you a KitchenAid mixer for a wedding gift. 

Add the eggs one at a time, and once those are fully incorporated, add in the flour one cup at a time. If you’re like me, you won’t heed those wise words and will dump all the flour in at once, which of course leads to you and your mixer covered in flour. And maybe the floor. And maybe some got on the cat, but he doesn’t care, so I guess that doesn’t really matter? But I digress! (I usually do.) Once you add all the ingredients, you should have a thick and delicious batter that looks like this:

At this point, you’re ready to bake it. If you’re using a pan, I can’t stress enough that you have to grease the pan very well. However, if you go the easy route like me, just put a (hopefully) equal amount of batter in each cupcake liner.

Now, the original recipe calls for about an hour of baking time (the first 30 minutes at 350, then lower the heat down to 340) , but that’s only if you’re making cake. Since I was making cupcakes, that cut the time down considerably, and they were done in about 20 minutes, but my oven may be the devil, so you will have to keep an eye on them the first time around. Also, because I’m lazy like that, I didn’t lower the heat when I was making my cupcakes. I’m sure there’s a reason to do it, though, so I suggest you try when making the cake. Let me know how it works out!

The finished product should have a light golden color, and be firm to the touch. I found that the cupcakes fell slightly after they cooled, although when I made this in cake pans, they didn’t. Weird? I don’t know. Delicious? Yes.