Bay Leaf Pound Cake with Orange Glaze

Bay leaves line the bottom of the cake.

David Lebovitz reverses the traditional way we make the pound cake in the bay leaf pound cake recipe in My Paris Kitchen. Most recipes begin by whisking the dry ingredients together, while creaming the butter and sugar in another bowl to aerate. (During the mixing process, the batter increases in volume to achieve a silken texture.) The dry ingredients are mixed in after all the wet ingredients have been combined.

In David’s method, the melted butter are whisked together with the wet ingredients: eggs, sour cream, orange zest and vanilla. The final step is combining this egg mixture with the dry ingredients. This is a much faster preparation. In addition, melted butter is much easier to work into the batter. He explains that melting the butter and saturating the flours result in a moist pound cake.

Well, the cake is moist, but there are other textural issues, as I see it. My cake is denser than the fine crumb, rich and buttery pound cake of my dream. It makes me wonder whether I forget to put in the one teaspoon of baking powder. There is no getting around that the texture is much heavier than is desirable. However, the earthy bay leaf flavor comes through; the orange zest adds a delightful citrusy zing. Overall, this is still a good cake.

What has gone astray with my bay leaf pound cake?

• The batter had a knobby feel to it, a sign of uneven mixing. There is no way I can draw a straight line down the center of the cake in step 6. I knew it then I didn’t get the batter quite right. My line turned out crooked and seemed to have a mind of its own.

• I poured in the melted butter with the wet ingredients all at once and then combined them. Maybe a better technique is to drizzle the butter into the wet ingredients in a steady stream in the food processor — for even distribution and emulsification. Proper mixing matters!

• A traditional pound cake calls for one pound (or equal weight) of eggs, butter, sugar and flour. David’s recipe uses 150, 115, 200 and 230 gram of each ingredient, respectively. By adding sour cream (125 grams) to the butter category, you have a total of 240 grams of fat. Now it’s obvious that there are fewer eggs in this recipe than most. One or two eggs might give the cake some lift.

The pound cake is infused with orange zest in the batter and orange glaze on top.

This is a big cake that’s meant to be shared. Visit Cook-the-book-Fridays and see how our friends are serving up this pound cake.