So I mentioned at work that I was thinking about baking this weekend. After two weeks of working straight through, I was in the mood to bake, it's how I relax. Everyone's tired and stressed. So they perked up, and somehow pound cake was mentioned. I can make that! I said, thinking that it was an easy project and everyone loves it.
"No, no!" the lab manager protested. "We can't have pound cake!"
What?
"It has to be kilo cake! We only use SI units around here."
Laughing, I pointed out that was a lot of cake batter. I'll make it in the dragon pan, I said, and probably have leftovers. I did.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For those who are rusty on their Imperial to metric (or System Internationale) conversions, a kilogram is about 2.24 pounds. Pretty much the first thing I decided was not to attempt this with an old-fashioned pound cake recipe that called for a pound of each ingredient. While it makes a wonderful, moist, rich cake, it would just never bake properly in the big dragon pan. So I pulled out my trusty Alton Brown cookbook and got to work modifying that recipe. It's lighter than a traditional pound cake, but not by much. You should allow nearly two hours for bake time!
A Kilo of Cake
500 g butter, brought to room temp (16 oz Imperial)
875 g sugar (31 oz)
330 g eggs (about 7 medium eggs)
11 g lemon extract (about 2 1/2 tsp)
1 kg flour (about 32 oz or 7 cups)
6 g baking soda (about 1 tsp, rounded)
6 g salt (about 1 tsp, rounded)
500 g buttermilk (or soured milk via addition of 1 tbsp lemon juice) about 18 oz (2 1/2 cups)
Preheat oven to 163 C (325 F).
Cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Slowly add in eggs, beating, and the lemon extract. Beat until light and fluffy. I used my stand mixer for this, but then:
Creamed sugar, butter, and eggs
Sift flour, salt, and baking soda into a very large bowl. Fold in the butter mixture and milk alternatively until everything is well incorporated. Batter should be stiff, but not dry. Add more milk a bit at a time if necessary.
Pound cake is almost bread-like in consistency, so the batter is correspondingly stiff.
Grease and flour your baking pans. I was using my dragon cake pan, but I also used a regular loaf pan for the overflow batter.
I baked the loaf pan for about 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean. The dragon...
I filled the dragon pan to here, it did rise and have to be leveled off.
Dragons like the heat. It didn't want to come out of the warm oven. I was beginning to worry that the top would burn, after over 90 minutes in the oven, when finally the toothpick came out clean. The directions I was able to find suggest allowing the cake to cool for 20-30 minutes before inverting the pan. It wasn't coming out at that time, and it was bedtime, so I left the pan inverted on a plate overnight. In the morning, it popped right out beautifully intact.
The dragon with her nestlings.