Mom’s Cream Cheese Pound Cake

If you need a dessert as simple and scrumptious as mom used to make, look no further than this golden Cream Cheese Pound Cake recipe. 

The past few months I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a baking rut. A few ideas I had high hopes for were only “meh” in reality, and a few others were just outright fails. Baking is my first love, but I was beginning to think I’d lost my knack for it.

It’s those times of discouragement that force me to scrap all the fancy pants ideas and go back to basics. I love developing my own recipes, but there’s something wonderfully satisfying about picking up an old, worn recipe card and following it exactly. No substitutions, no tweaks, no reworking. Just me and an old favorite, coming to life together in the kitchen.

This time, I turned to a family recipe that’s been loved as long as I can remember: Mom’s Cream Cheese Pound Cake. It had been such a long time since I’d made it, but pulling out the batter stained recipe card was like rediscovering an old friend. As most pound cakes go, this one is ridiculously easy to make. It only has 7 ingredients and one of them is salt. The others include an absurd amount of butter, cream cheese, sugar, and eggs. They don’t call it pound cake for nothing, friends.

I was a tad bit anxious as I waited for these loaves to bake, wondering if perhaps my baking skills really had disappeared. But as always, this recipe delivered. The cake was golden and dense and smelled like vanilla and childhood. My impatience got the better of me, and I sliced myself a piece long before the poor loaves had a chance to cool. It was just like mom used to make. Perfect.

This pound cake really needs no accessory, but of course that doesn’t stop me from adding it. My favorite way to serve it is warm with a scoop of ice cream and fresh smashed strawberries, but this time I decided to go for something a bit different. Mom always liked to slather her slices with cream cheese, so I grabbed some whipped strawberry cream cheese and spread it on top. It was simply wonderful. My tastebuds were actually cheering so loud it completely drowned out the cries coming from my waistline.

If you’re looking to recover your baking mojo, this cream cheese pound cake is the recipe for you. It’s so easy to make and absolutely fool proof. And since it makes two loaves, you can enjoy one now and freeze another for last minute company or any day when you need a sweet pick-me-up. I don’t want to put ideas into your head, but a few slices of this on the grill served with whipped cream and berries would probably be life changing. Not that I would know or anything.