Sour Cream Pound Cake with Fresh Fruit, Whipped Cream, and Toasted Coconut

Happy Birthday Mom! She's not much of a paint-the-town-red type, and moms are notoriously hard to buy for (unless you go to my company, insert shameless plug here), so I made dinner for her and Dad and delivered it to them. Dinner was salmon--good but not especially blogworthy. The dessert, however, was a reliable showstopper that I've been making since I found the recipe in an issue of Family Circle magazine years ago. They say pound cake was so named because it contains a pound of butter and sugar and while the measurements are not entirely accurate, it's certainly a special occasion treat.

Wilma Head's Sour Cream Pound Cake (with Janet's garnish of whipped cream, fresh fruit, and toasted coconut)

1 cup butter, at room temperature
3 cups sugar
6 large eggs, separated into yolks and whites
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 8-oz. container sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Butter and flour 10" tube pan with removable bottom. Cut out a piece of wax paper to fit bottom of pan and slide into place. In medium-size bowl, beat together butter and sugar on medium speed until thoroughly blended, about 5 minutes. Beat in yolks.

In large bowl, combine sifted flour, salt, and baking soda; sift two more times. Alternately beat flour mixture and sour cream with the extract into butter mixture, beginning and ending with flour.


In large clean bowl, with clean beaters, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry peaks form. Stir one-third of whites into batter. Fold in remaining whites. Spoon into prepared tube pan.


Bake 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours until cake tester comes out clean. Transfer pan to wire rack; let cool 5 minutes. Remove cake from pan to wire rack; let cool completely.

Janet's Notes: Man, what a Type A personality Wilma Head must have. Instead of the zillion-step preparation to get that tube pan ready, I lined my 8 1/2x5x3 loaf pan with a bit of parchment and dumped the batter in because I have better things to do with my life than cut waxed paper into perfect rounds. Also, on that same note, I didn't sift my flour three times and instead sifted it zero times. The pound cake came out great. Finally, I just beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and didn't worry about their dryness. Get real Wilma! (Great recipe, though, I have to give you that.)

Not a tube pan, and no, it's not bulging at the sides. That's your imagination.

The crunchy top is the best part.