Here's a third recipe for comparative purposes. This recipe was given to me by my husband's ex-MIL. She demonstrated what a classy lady she is by not leaving out any ingredients! 3 cups sugar 1 cup butter 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 3 cups cake flour (measured after sifting) 1/2 pint (unwhipped) whipping cream Cream the sugar and butter together. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well. Add the vanilla. Mix the flour and whipping cream in together, a little of each at a time. Pour into either a (greased/floured) tube pan or two (greased/floured) loaf pans. Put into a cold oven and bake at 300* for 1 hour, 25 mins.

Thanks.

Hi, everyone! Infrequent poster here, but dedicated drooler :-) at the beautiful photos that so many of you post! I just had to try this pound cake - I made it yesterday, and it's fabulous! I didn't have any lemon extract, so I used vanilla as ann t did, and I added a bit more lemon zest, just because we *love* lemon! I used 6 mini loaf pans and reduced the cooking time to an hour - I was thinking the original hour and 1/2 was for the large bundt and not the minis and maybe the recipe didn't reflect that. I love to cook but I don't have much experience with baking, lol! Thank you ann t, posting this recipe and the beautiful pic that lured me to try it :-) - this is going in my keeper folder and I plan on making many more for the holiday season. Cheers! cj

It will probably work with the really fine kind of cake meal. I have issues with M. cake meal. I think it tastes like the sands of the desert that the Israelites crossed and is meant to remind us of eating dust before we entered the Promised Land. But, yeah, even when I've made non-Passover sponge cakes they've been with separated eggs and no fat, or occasionally a chiffon with a bit of oil, for something denser, like honeycake. I don't want a rich, butter sponge cake! I want it to be poofy and puff out air when you bite it and be all eggy and light as down. Though a thoroughly Jewish way to make it rich is to top it with sour cream. :) I don't think it's probably a good combination if you didn't grow up with it, but orange or almond sponge cake with sour cream is one of those remembered delights from childhood. :) Joy of Baking has a nice article about sponges and other "foam" cakes. I think my resistance to the butter is about blurring. Butter cakes are rich, moist, a little sticky. Sponge cakes are fluffy, light, a little crumbly. They have such different crumbs. Trying to make a sponge with butter to prove that you can by whipping enough is a fun experiment, but if you put a slice of it and a slice of butter cake next to each other, you won't get as much of that feeling that you're eating two different cakes! Everything blurs to the center, when all of the interesting stuff is at the edges.