the best chocolate pound cake

My mom has been making pound cake my whole life, I've only really had one that I liked and it was hers. It is also my dad's favorite cake, so every time his birthday rolled around that was the cake. My grandfather used to spread it with butter and toast it.

 This year my dad reminisced about having a chocolate pound cake, that he would slice and his mother would put a slab of "ice milk" on it and that was one of his favorite pound cake memories.  I set out to find a chocolate pound cake recipe online, thinking that wouldn't be too hard right? Hadn't I made one from that one site? Or that one chef really does it right, right? No wait, it was definitely this one I don't usually check. But no.  No one makes my mom's pound cake. 

So I had to research some. I tried one recipe that had great reviews and it was just plain, actually really disappointing chocolate cake. No pound, no moisture, no great crunchy crust like I grew up with.

So I then printed out another recipe and compared it with the one from our family cookbook.  (Thanks to my Aunt Paula for compiling a treasure trove of family recipes!)

I'm glad I had this one handy because the quantities were certainly different. Looking up substituting cocoa powder into a recipe, and comparing with the printed recipe I determined that I would use 3/4 cup of cocoa subbed into my Great-Great Aunt Bertie's recipe, that my Great Aunt Nell had been using (with a 1/2 teaspoon of salt added according to the hand-written card my mom has) and my mom informed me that SHE uses all butter, no shortening. So with these addendums in hand I moved forward.

Chocolate Pound Cake (originally Great Aunt Nell, and Great-Great Aunt Bertie's recipe)

3 cups of sugar

5 eggs

1 1/2 cups butter (3 sticks)

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/4 cups flour

3/4 cups cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Have all ingredients at room temperature

1. Beat sugar and butter in bowl until as fluffy as egg whites. 

2. Add eggs, one at a time, scraping down bowl in-between additions. Add vanilla.

3. Sift dry ingredients together.

4. Add dry ingredients alternately with the milk. 

5. Use butter and cocoa powder in the pan, and bake at 325F for 1 hour. (I overfilled the pan--my pan is smaller than the one my mom uses--so had I used a bigger pan I think that time would be accurate, but I ended up baking for more like 1.5 hours, and having to slice off a balloon of cake at the top. In the future I'll either use a larger pan, or make a little cook's treat. If yours isn't enormous, check after an hour to see how your cake is coming along)

6. Let sit in pan about 5 minutes, but empty out and cool on rack while still hot.

I dusted mine with powdered sugar, and I think that looked great, and covered some lack of consistent color. 

And as I said at the beginning, my dad prefers his chocolate pound cake with a slab of "ice milk" which I found easily is made with 4 cups of milk (whole is what I used) to 1 cup of sugar. I added vanilla seeds and extract the first time around, and I used vanilla paste the second time with a pinch of salt. I liked the second one better.  In fact, I like it with a drizzle of honey and sprinkle of sea salt, sans cake! (Freeze using ice cream maker, and then store in freezer for further hardening.) I had such a nostalgic hit eating that ice milk. 

Happy Birthday Dad!