Sometimes I like to give myself challenges or tasks in the baking world. I called this my first baking challenge: The Perfect Poundcake. I gave myself the weekend of July 21-22 2012 to complete it. It stemmed from the fact that I had made Ina Garten’s Honey Vanilla Poundcake and it was dry to my dismay although quite flavorful. I know that poundcake tends to be dry when most people make it, but I loved everything that came out of my Barefoot Contessa cookbook, so I decided that I would try to perfect a poundcake.

My plan was to modify Ina’s recipe & try a random recipe off the internet that looked interesting to me. For Ina’s recipe I thought about the dryness aspect. In some of my other bread recipes I use oil instead of butter. I know that this may be frowned upon in some baking circles, but it makes some breads incredibly moist. So I decided to replace half of the butter with oil. I didn’t want to lose the denseness from the butter but I thought that if oil worked in other recipes than maybe it would work here. Friends, it was a failure. Not only was it just as dry, but I had lost some flavor as well. The honey vanilla notes did not come through as strong.

On to the random recipe. This one was intruiguing to me. It used cream, where Ina had no liquid really to speak of, and it started in a cold oven and baked for a longer period of time. The poundcake didn’t look as pretty, but it was just as flavorful and oh so moist.

I know this wasn’t a very difficult baking challenge, but it made me feel successful & happy. Sometimes that is all you need. Also, I should thank those around me who ate lots of poundcake along the way as I was going towards my goal.

Sorry for the lack of recipes, but I don’t have the source from which the random one came so do not feel right publishing it without giving proper credit.