Serves 15 to 20
GRAMMA WAS OF AN INTERESTING GENERATION, FOOD-WISE—BORN IN 1934, her early eating years were pre-convenience foods, and everything was made from scratch (my maternal great-grandmother had mad baking game, as the story goes). But by the time she was an adult and raising six (!) children of her own, packaged foods and box mixes had made their way into American kitchens, and she embraced that, too. Many a family birthday was celebrated with a box-mix yellow cake (but always with a homemade fudge frosting). One cake that she did make from scratch and talked about with a gleam in her eye was this pound cake, a recipe given to her by her sister-in-law—my great-aunt Phyllis of Memphis, Tennessee, my grandfather’s only sister. Gramma described this cake to me as having a “sugar crust,” and she’s not wrong. While there’s no sugar actually sprinkled over the batter before baking, it bakes into an irresistibly sweet, crunchy shell on the very top, the perfect foil to the velvety, tender interior.
The original recipe makes one large cake in a Bundt pan or tube pan, but you can also divide the batter and bake it in two standard loaf pans (or halve the recipe for one loaf). I recommend making the full recipe in two loaf pans because this cake freezes beautifully. So, bake one and freeze one—you won’t regret it. Or even better, give it to a lucky neighbor.
1 cup/225 g unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for pan(s)
3 cups/360 g cake flour, spooned and leveled, plus more for pan(s)
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
3 cups/600 g granulated sugar
6 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup/240 g full-fat sour cream
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 325°F/170°C. Butter and flour a 12- to 15-cup/2.8 to 3.6 L Bundt pan or two 9 × 5-inch/23 × 12.7 cm loaf pans.
Sift the cake flour into a large bowl. Whisk in the salt and baking soda.
In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium speed until creamy. Add the sugar and beat on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Reduce the speed to medium-low, and beat in the eggs, 1 and a time. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl and stir in the sour cream and vanilla on low speed. Add the flour mixture, ½ cup/64 g at a time, on low speed until the batter is smooth.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan(s) and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out mostly clean with a few moist crumbs, about 90 minutes for the Bundt cake, and 60 to 70 minutes for 2 loaf pans. Let cool in the pan(s) for 20 minutes before unmolding and allowing to cool completely on a wire rack.