My Weekend Baking Part 2: Honey Whole Wheat Pound Cake

A continuation of my weekend baking – part two! Yes, that’s right, I spent all Sunday morning in my kitchen baking not one, but two different recipes. I was up at 8AM and still baking at noon. I call it “therapy baking.” Which I will be doing some more of tonight: I’m just beginning to come out of my week-long sinus infection (thank you roommate’s humidifier!) and last night I began reading the “History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933-84,” which is a 52-page historical report by the USDA’s Economic Research Service on, you guessed it, the evolution of agricultural legislation in the U.S. from 1933-1984. It’s dense, but the report is only the calm before the storm; my Food Systems professor assigned it as merely a prep document for understanding the actual 2008 Farm Bill, which is over 1770 pages long by the way. Yeah, no big deal.

In any event, I’ll probably be re-baking this recipe (since it was such a big hit at TBECC) for the NYU Earth Day Fair tomorrow where Slow Food NYU will be hosting a table along with the bajillion other green clubs at NYU (check out the line-up, it’s so awesome to see such a strong showing of environmentalism at NYU). This recipe is a Joy the Baker original. I used local eggs from Millport Farms in Lancaster, Penn (they also have AMAZING raw milk cheese) and local honey from Andrew’s Local Honey (a beekeeper I interviewed for an article I wrote a year and a half ago on rogue beekeepers – before NYC beekeeping was legal!) all gathered at the Union Square Greenmarket.

Honey Whole Wheat Pound Cake
Original recipe from Joy the Baker

Ingredients
2 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour (I used 1 cup white flour and 1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour since I didn’t have whole wheat pastry flour and I didn’t want to use all whole wheat flour, which can be pretty dense and overwhelmingly wheaty)
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks (12 Tablespoons of butter)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a loaf pan.
2. Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a small bowl and set aside.
3. In the bowl of an electric stand mixer, whip the butter, sugar and honey on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 to 4 minutes. (Again, I don’t have my dear Kitchen Aid, so I just used an electric hand mixer) Add the vanilla extract. Add the eggs one at a time, beating for about one minute after each addition. Scrape down the bowl as needed.
4. Add the dry mixture and buttermilk in three additions, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Stop the mixer and scrape the bottom of the bowl with a spatula to make sure everything is evenly incorporated.
5. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan. Smooth the top down and bake the cake for about an hour. The cake will be a lovely golden brown and a thin knife inserted into the center of the cake will come out clean.
6. Let the cake cool in the pan for 20 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

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