Paula Dean's buttery pound cake with fresh strawberry drizzle!

Lately I've been searching for a super yummy dessert that incorporates fresh fruit without needing to bake the fruit and lose that fresh flavor.

I was perusing the Food Network recipe list (900+ pages, OH MY GOODNESS) and came across Paula Dean's mother's recipe for buttery pound cake and decided to make my own yummy strawberry topping for it.

I used my KitchenAid stand mixer (greatest cooking aid EVER in my opinion), and a tube pan (you could use a deep bundt pan if you want too).

The recipe from FoodNetwork.com is as follows:

1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter
1/2 cup vegetable shortening (and some extra to grease the pan before flouring)
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour (some extra to flour the pan after greasing)
1/2 tsp fine salt (as always I used fine sea salt)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350°F

In mixer, cream butter and shortening together. Add sugar gradually. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beat into creamed mixture after adding each egg is added. Stir dry ingredients together in a bowl and add to mixer alternately with milk, starting with flour and ending with the flour. Mix until combined then mix in vanilla extract.
Grease your tube pan then coat the grease with a light layer of flour. Pour batter into the greased and floured tube pan and bake for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the came comes out clean.*

*I ended up only baking this for 1 hour and 15 minutes, it turned out perfect!

My family devoured a good chunk of this cake before I could get a picture of the finished product, but at least you can see the inside and how delicious it looks!

For the strawberry topping all you need is a blender or in my case a Baby Bullet:

1 pound fresh strawberries, de-stemmed and cut into 1/2 inch bits
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Once your strawberries are cut, separate a little less than half of the mixture (I'd say bout 1/3 of it) and set aside.

In a saucepan over medium heat, add the strawberries that are left, sugar and vanilla. Stirring occasionally until the mixture melts down the sugar and begins to thicken, about 5 minutes or so. Remove from heat and let cool. Once cooled pour the mixture from the saucepan into your blender and puree. Add pureed mixture to your fresh cut strawberries you first set aside and mix. Let cool in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes and then you should be good to spoon this over your servings of pound cake!

The family loved it so much, and my 16 month old went nuts over the strawberry sauce topping (especially when she found bits of fresh strawberry in it)!
Both the pound cake and the topping were extremely easy to make and next time I think I will try and do this with blueberries or blackberries to see how those turn out as well! Plus this gives me an excuse to use my Baby Bullet now that my daughter is off of pureed foods!!!


Casandra