My Cream Cheese Pound Cake

I realize that pound cake recipes are not lacking in the world, but I figured I would throw out my own recipe.  I started making this pound cake about 2 years ago when I was selling baked goods and honey at the Gibsonville Farmer's Market.  I did not get rich off the cake, but I did get a lot of complements, so I thought I would share it.

This cake can be boring by itself, so I love to have it with strawberries or other types of fruit.  Sometimes I like to have a slice with my morning coffee.  When I made it this time, I made it for our gender reveal party, so I actually put blue food coloring in it and put cream cheese icing on top to hide the blue color.  We served it with Kathryn's homemade strawberry ice cream and it was delightful.

Here's what you need:

Only 6 ingredients!
1 (8oz.) package cream cheese
3 sticks butter
3 cups sugar
6 eggs
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 325.  Grease your pound cake pan.  Kathryn puts wax paper in the bottom of the pan to make sure that the cake does not stick, but I usually don't do this and I don't have problems; nevertheless, this was the gender reveal cake, so I wanted to make sure that I would not have problems, so that's why I used the wax paper.  Use a large pan because this cake expands... don't use just a bunt pan... I did that once and I had pound cake in the bottom of my oven.

2. In your mixer (Note: I love my Kitchen Aid mixer and I'm pretty sure I would not want to bake without it), cream butter and cream cheese until smooth.  It helps if you let the butter and cream cheese get soft before creaming it.

3. Add sugar gradually and beat until fluffy.  I always take my time with this step... I just let then mixer do the hard work as I slowly sprinkle in the sugar.

4. Add eggs two at a time making sure that you beat it well after each addition.

5. Add the flour all at one time and mix it in.

6. After the flour is all mixed in, add your vanilla.  I completely forgot to take a picture of this and I took a picture of adding the blue food coloring instead.  Try to imagine vanilla rather than blue food coloring going into the cake in the picture below :)

7. Now pour it in the pan and bake in your 325 degree oven for 1 hour and 20 minutes.  You may want to do the toothpick test starting at 1 hour.  Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it does not take as long.  Just keep and eye on it.

8. When you take it out of the oven, let the pan cool on a baking rack for awhile.  When the pan is cool enough for you to pick it up with your hands, you can flip it over and dump the cake out.  Let the cake cool completely.  I usually don't put icing on this cake, but because I wanted to hide the blue color coming though, I used a thin layer of cream cheese icing (nope, I don't have the recipe for that icing because I bought it at the store).  Just dress up the cake however you want.  Enjoy!