I found a really great blog and a great pound cake recipe thanks to Amanda's Cookin who is a hosting a fabulous event called The Secret Recipe Club. You are allotted a blog once a month and you can choose to make anything from it in "Secret". Then on a given day and time all the bloggers from The Secret Recipe Club put up a blog post that reveals the recipe and blogger they have blogged about. Since, it is not revealed till the particular day - it is all a big secret till the big D-day and everyone is looking forward to seeing who blogged about whom and which of their recipes were featured!
The blog I was given is Once A Month Mom - a great concept blog that talks about cooking once a month in bulk and freezing food so that you can provide your family, especially your kids, fresh food to eat - it helps you to save money and eat more healthily. They have a a whole lot of ideas going on there so you must go on and have a peep.
Now, they were a lot of wonderful recipes out there but the one that caught my eye was of a Perfect Pound Cake... and how could I make it perfect by adding my own inputs to it - was a very last minute Mango-ey twist in the tale.
When I read the recipe one night I thought I had hit jackpot and I had all the ingredients to put it together but realized I was missing condensed milk - one of it's important ingredient and then a few nail biting moments followed to a very gorgeous, moist and flavorful Mango Pound Cake.
Kelly @ OAMM got this recipe from Jun-Blog and the beautiful pound cake was served with luscious strawberries...
So lets look at the ingredients...everything that you'd usually be stocked in on - my changes are added in italics
Ingredients
1 cup unsalted butter - reduced the quantity to 1/2 salted butter & 1/4 canola oil
11/3 cup all purpose flour
3/4tsp baking powder - I think I only added 1/2 tsp
1/4 tsp cinnamon - omitted
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt - omitted
3/4 cup organic condensed milk - substituted with 3/4 cup fresh mango puree sweetened with a couple of tablespoons of sugar since my mangoes weren't too sweet
3 large eggs
Method:
If you want the original recipe you can follow it here
My recipe is a bit different
I whisked the butter and then added the sugar and vanilla and beat it with an electric beater. I added the eggs to this and whisked till everything was creamy.
I added the all purpose flour and mixed it together with a whisk till it just came together. I then added the mango puree with a very light hand. I wanted to create swirls and do a two toned cake but my cake batter and mango were almost a similar golden-orange hue.
I baked it in a pre-heated oven an 179C for 50 minutes and I didn't turn it out of the pan immediately after it came out of the oven so the whole cake seemed to sink a bit.
I had a couple of tablespoons of mango puree remaining so I added some icing sugar in it and created a glaze for the cake. It was lapped up before I could chop up some fresh mangoes to serve it with.
Few observations:
It tasted better after it cooled down and have been refrigerated. It was as moist and didn't dry out. It was not too sweet and if you want to make it really really sweet - I would increase the sugar from 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup. I would also leave out 1 egg and bake this with 2 eggs 'coz I found the taste slightly egg-y but no-one else seemed to complain!
