Martha has a recipe for blackberry pound cake in July/Aug Everyday Food, but notes you can swap blueberries for blackberries, which is what I did. This was easy to whip up – basically a pound cake with blueberry puree swirled through it. I subbed out whole wheat pastry flour for half of the regular flour and I added some cinnamon (about 1/2 tsp) to the blueberry puree. Everyone in my house gobbled this up almost instantly. It was sweet and moist and very good.

1/2 c butter

6 oz berries

1 1/4 c plus 2 tbsp sugar

1 1/2 c flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 c sour cream

Puree berries with 2 tbsp sugar. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla, mix. Add dry ingredients alternating with sour cream. Put half the batter in a loaf pan and top with 1/2 cup puree. Put in rest of batter and cover with remaining puree. Bake at 350 for  1 hour 15 min.

Note Martha says to only put 1/2 cup puree in the middle of the batter. I think this might be a typo and she meant to say put half of the puree in the middle. I did it as the recipe said and there wasn’t much in the middle and tons on top. I would definitely put half in the middle to even things out.

Martha has a recipe for blackberry pound cake in July/Aug Everyday Food, but notes you can swap blueberries for blackberries, which is what I did. This was easy to whip up – basically a pound cake with blueberry puree swirled through it. I subbed out whole wheat pastry flour for half of the regular flour … Read more →

My experience with pound cake has mostly been with the Sara Lee kind you buy from the freezer section of the grocery store. Martha would be horrified. I’ve never made my own. I buy pound cake once a year – to dip in our New Year’s Eve fondue.

The Martha Stewart Living July issue has a huge spread on pound cakes – more than 10 kinds. My son was graduating from 5th grade, so I decided to whip up a few different kinds as a dessert.

I started with the basic pound cake recipe. Since I was rushing around, I failed to read it carefully and notice that it actually makes two loaves.  Once I realized I was going to have two, I decided to make one chocolate chip and one poppy seed. This just meant I needed to add those ingredients last, so I split the batter in half.

Let me just say here that this batter was so good that I could have just eaten it plain. I was like a little kid – constantly sneaking taste after taste of it. It was out of this world.

At the same time, I also made a batch of blueberry pound cake, which uses the basic recipe, but has you substitute 1/2 cup of sour cream for one stick of butter and add 2 cups of blueberries that have been tossed with 2 tbsp flour. I ended up with two loaves of this, but am

planning to foist one off on my in-laws. This batter tasted good, but not as good as the original batter.

Into the oven my 4 loaf pans went.  The recipe says to bake for 65 minutes. My poppy seed loaf was done in that time, but the others took about 10 minutes longer.

They all came out of the pans easily, which was a relief. The bad news is that the cake did not taste anywhere as good as the batter and I don’t know why. It wasn’t too dry. It just

tasted bland and boring, even with the poppy seeds, chips, or berries.  Now, it wasn’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination and maybe the batter just inflated my expectations.

The blueberry loaf was the most moist and the blueberries really looked beautiful. The chocolate chip loaf was sweet and good, but I would rather eat a chocolate chip cookie. I felt the poppy seed load needed lemon to give it some flavor.

The family thought the cakes were good, but honestly you would be hard pressed to put cake in front of them and get complaints.

I don’t think I would make these recipes again. Sorry Martha.

My experience with pound cake has mostly been with the Sara Lee kind you buy from the freezer section of the grocery store. Martha would be horrified. I’ve never made my own. I buy pound cake once a year – to dip in our New Year’s Eve fondue. The Martha Stewart Living July issue has … Read more →