This recipe comes courtesy of The Perfect Cake by America's Test Kitchen. It did indeed make a lovely pound cake (that was quickly devoured). I did find myself wishing that the sour cream came through a little more though. I wonder if it would be possible to cut back the butter slightly and up the sour cream a bit. Even if that doesn't work though, this still makes for a great cranberry pound cake. And it's a nice way to use up that last bit of sour cream languishing in the fridge.

Cranberry-Sour Cream Pound Cake

Slightly adapted from The Perfect Cake by America's Test Kitchen

Ingredients

• 5 large eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour¹
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/3 c. sour cream
• 2 Tbsp. milk
• 14 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/4 c. sugar
• 1 c. frozen cranberries, chopped coarse
• 1 Tbsp. icing (powdered/confectioners') sugar

Directions

1. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position, preheat oven to 300°F (150°C), and grease and flour a loaf tin (preferably 8.5"/22cm by 4.5"/11cm).
2. Whisk eggs and vanilla together in a large measuring cup.
3. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder into a medium-sized bowl.
4. Whisk sour cream and milk together in a small bowl.
5. In a large bowl, beat butter on medium-high speed until smooth and creamy (2-3 minutes).
6. Reduce speed to medium and gradually add sugar.
7. Increase speed to medium-high and beat until pale and fluffy (3-5 minutes).
8. Reduce speedto medium and gradually add egg mixture.
9. Scrape down bowl and continue to mix on medium speed for ~1 minute.
10. Reduce speed to low and add flour mixture in three additions, alternating with sour cream mixture in two additions.
11. Toss cranberries with icing sugar until evenly coated.
12. Gently fold cranberries into batter.
13. Pour batter into prepared tin and tap/drop a few times to release air bubbles.
14. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1 hour 45 minutes to 1 hour 55 minutes. (Toothpick inserted in centre should come out clean.)
15. Let cook in tin for 15 minutes.
16. Remove from tin and transfer to wire rack to finish cooling.

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¹ In the preamble to the recipe, ATK notes that they didn't want this cake to have as tight a crumb as a classic pound cake, so they switched the cake (soft/plain/standard) flour out for all-purpose flour. If you're not in a region that has all-purpose flour, I think whatever hard/strong/high grade/bread flour you can get locally would probably be fine. If you don't mind the tighter crumb, you could also simply go with a soft/plain/standard/cake flour. If you want to get really precise about it, you could always try mixing hard and soft flours to get something approximating all-purpose flour. All-purpose flour is still relatively hard, so I'd probably only use 1/4-1/2 c. of soft flour for this recipe and make the balance hard. ^Back