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Monday, April 07, 2008

Apricot Pound Cake


Until I was a mother it never crossed my mind to have apricot nectar as a staple kitchen item. As a special treat, Danny gets a small can of it on Friday evening and woe be mama if she forgets to buy it. Once in a while I happen upon recipes that call for nectar and I'm always interested in giving them a try. This recipe sounded interesting, but faulty.

I've baked enough pound cakes in my life (one could argue, too many) that I know dumping all the ingredients into a bowl and simply mixing and pouring isn't the way to go. It probably would make cake, but I decided to approach it the way I've always dealt with dense, rich cakes by creaming together butter and sugar, adding eggs one at a time and alternating liquids with flour in three additions. I also looked at the recipe and knew the listed amount of baking soda wasn't going to be enough. I doubled it. The original was at About.com in the Southern Cooking section. Usually, these are pretty well edited, but this one was seriously off. Again, it might have worked fine, but I am pleased with the results using a more traditional method.

I also ignored the instructions to coat the cake in apricot jam and made a sauce with strained preserves, tinned apricots and lemon juice. Some whipped cream was a nice addition.

In the middle of making this cake, one of the beaters stopped rotating on my hand mixer. I pulled it out and proceeded with one beater, which in the very last seconds of mixing also stopped. I'll always think of this as the cake that killed the hand mixer but really, it shouldn't have. The batter wasn't too heavy and the mixer was just over a year old. It wasn't cheap either. One-year warranty. Boo hiss, Sunbeam-I'll never buy your appliances again. Call me old fashioned, but when I buy an appliance I don't expect to be replacing it yearly. On a brighter note, the whipped cream I made with a whisk in a metal bowl actually came together faster and better than when I use the electric mixer. So there! You should see me do egg whites in my copper bowl. For an arthritic cripple I sure can wield a whisk.

Papa and Danny were both delighted with their dessert and even admitted it might be as good as (though not better than) mama's chocolate pudding. I tried a bite (a scant, bite really) of the cake, but as I'm still having difficulty swallowing I skipped the fruit and sauce. I suspect it will be even better tomorrow after it has thoroughly cooled and set. I'm freezing half, as it is a very large cake and will update the post when it is served from the freezer noting the results. In my experience, pound cakes freeze beautifully though mine do not usually have sour cream as an ingredient. The sour cream was on deep sale at our grocer two weeks ago and I've been using it in place of buttermilk when I can. I still have another large container, but it is good until May. With food prices being as they are, I find it best to adjust my menus to what's on sale. When I came home with all that sour cream my husband gave me an odd look. I shrugged and chalked it up to being half Ukrainian. You could eat worse than a slice of home baked rye bread slathered with sour cream.

You Will Need:

For The Pound Cake:

3 cups sugar
1-cup butter-at room temperature
1-cup sour cream
½ cup apricot nectar
1-teaspoon vanilla extract
2-3 drops concentrated lemon oil or, 1 tablespoon lemon zest
6 eggs at room temperature
3 cups all purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter and flour a 12-cup tube pan (the recipe called for a Bundt cake pan, but that sounded like a disaster waiting to happen). Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well. Add the sour cream and mix well. Add the extract and lemon oil or zest to the nectar and stir. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl.

Alternating between the flour and the nectar/extract mixture, add to the butter mixture in three additions. Mix very well and then beat on high for about three minutes. Pour into prepared pan, place pan atop a baking sheet (because you know a tube pan is going to leak some) and bake 1 hour and twenty minutes or until it tests done (mine took about an hour and forty minutes but my oven is possessed). Cool on a rack in the pan for twenty minutes, then very carefully remove and finish cooling on rack.

For the Sauce:

1 large tin of apricot halves in syrup, drained and sliced in half (if you like)
½ jar of the cheapest, store-brand apricot preserves you can find (honestly, you do not want to waste expensive preserves for this)
1 tablespoon lemon juice

In a saucepan over low heat, melt the preserves with the lemon juice until thin. Put through a fine strainer removing the fruit (in my experience the "fruit" is mostly skins anyway). Mix well with the sliced apricots and spoon warm over cake.

Add some homemade, lightly sweetened whipped cream if you're feeling decadent. Your family might even like it (almost) as much as chocolate pudding.

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