Technique #72: Make Almost No-Bowl Cakes With a Food Processor

A pound cake should be the ultimate easy cake. After all, it’s basically eggs, butter, sugar, and flour, mixed together and baked in a loaf pan.

But if it’s so easy, why do pound cakes so often turn out spongy, rubbery, heavy, and dry rather than fine- crumbed, rich, moist, and buttery?

The particular problem with pound cake is that because of the high number of eggs, most recipes use a finicky mixing and creaming method in which all the ingredients need to be at precisely the right temperature and the batter needs to be mixed for a precise amount of time; otherwise, instead of emulsifying properly, the batter turns into a curdled, broken mess—and there's no way to save it.

Looking for a simpler, foolproof way to make this everyday cake, we found a less fussy approach to mixing the batter: Rather than using softened butter, which is typically called for, we used hot melted butter, a method often used for quick breads. Melting the butter eliminated all of the issues associated with creaming.

The fast-moving blade of the processor, in conjunction with the hot butter, emulsified the liquid ingredients quickly and consistently before they ever had a chance to curdle.

We call our technique “almost no-bowl” because we transferred the liquidy mixture to a bowl and sifted in the cake flour by hand and folded it in with a whisk, to be extra-sure no pockets of flour would mar our cake.

You could, however, blend in the flour using the food processor, if you wish.

Because of the emulsion, the food processor is particularly well suited to mixing pound cake batter. But it’s great for other snacking cakes that don’t require such a precise emulsion; for example, carrot cake typically requires lots of chopping or shredding by hand.

We devised a recipe that uses the food processor to do it all: chop the carrots and nuts, mix the batter, and even make the frosting—everything but bake the cake!