Kaye Wilkinson Barley's Chocolate Walnut Pound Cake

Photo: Kaye Wilkinson Barley

Today is National Pound Cake Day. Pound Cake is so versatile. The name Pound Cake comes from the fact that the original pound cakes contained one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Made it easy to remember! No leaveners were used other than the air whipped into the batter. A cake made of one pound of each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour would have been very large and would have been able to serve multiple families. As years went by, the portions of the ingredients used were adjusted to make a smaller, lighter cake. However, the name of the cake stuck. Pound cakes are generally baked in either a loaf pan or a Bundt pan. They can be iced or dusted with powdered sugar.

I've posted many pound cake (and bundt cake) recipes over the years. I love this recipe by my friend Kaye Wilkinson Barley. Kaye blogs at Meanderings and Muses and Jungle Red Writers about mystery and crime fiction, but more importantly, she just published her first novel, Whimsey. Check it out. It's wonderful! I love when my chocolate and mystery worlds collide.

Happy Pound Cake Day!

Kaye Wilkinson Barley:
Bittersweet Chocolate Walnut Pound Cake

Ingredients:
Sifted cocoa for preparing the baking pan
2 sticks butter, room temperature
1 1/3 cup sugar
3 large eggs, room temperature
1 2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup vanilla yogurt, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
2 3-oz. bars bittersweet chocolate, chopped

Preheat oven to 325. Butter a 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan. Dust with sifted cocoa (instead of flour).
Cream the butter with an electric mixer. Add the sugar gradually and continue to beat for 5 minutes Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each one.
In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, soda and salt. Alternately add the dry ingredients and the vanilla yogurt to the batter, ending with the flour. Mix in the vanilla extract, nuts and chopped chocolate.
Pour into prepared loaf pan and bake at 325 for approximately 1 hour and 10-15 minutes, being EXTRA careful not to overcook (mine only took an hour).
Let the finished cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Then turn cake onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

This recipe is from The Pound Cake Cookbook by Bibb Jordan. I love this little book.

Notes: I didn't use the loaf pan called for in this recipe, obviously. The dough was much thinner in a bundt pan than it would have been in a loaf pan, so took much less time to bake. Much less. The first time I baked it, I left it too long and the cake was dry. The next time, I think I only let it bake for about 45 minutes or so. Check it early and often! The other thing I did a little differently was to toss in few extra walnuts along with a few more bittersweet chocolate chunks than called for. Yum!