Dad’s Chocolate Pound Cake…on the Smoker For Man Food Mondays.

Stand BACK! I’m going to try science!……

There is an art to cooking and a science to baking, as things go around our house, Michelle is the baker, and I am only a cook. Granted, there are a few dessert things I will make, but for the most part I stick to meats and veggies – not so this time. My sister told me a while back that she had found one of dad’s pound cake recipe’s, it’s an old school concoction that calls for margarine ( I did use butter instead FYI.) and Crisco…..and if I am guessing correctly, this may have been handed down from my Granny to my dad.

I decided to try cooking it on the smoker (minus the smoke). So, that is how we have Dad’s Chocolate Pound Cake…on the smoker….To start let me say that the cake does not taste “smokey.” I “baked” it over lump charcoal on my Brinkmann smoker without the water pan and not using any hard woods for smoke.  The fire as in the very bottom and the cake was at the very top, under the dome lid.  I used my Maverick et732 digital thermometer to watch the smoker temperature, and I started the fire about an hour before I put the cake on. I did that so that I could get a feel for how the smoker was going to act as well as how much tweaking I was going to have to do to keep the temperature constant.  When you think about it, before there were gas and electric ovens everything was baked in wood fired ovens, it’s actually a trendy thing to do these days….go figure.

Interested? let’s see how I did it.

Print

Dad’s Chocolate Pound Cake…on the Smoker For Man Food Mondays.

Prep 30 mins

Cook 90 mins

Total 1 hour, 60 mins

Author Steve

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
• 3 cups sugar
• 3 cups all-purpose flour, sifted after measuring
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (Crisco)
• 5 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 1/4 cup milk
• 1 teaspoons vanilla extract
• Powdered sugar for topping
• Bakers Joy to coat the pan

Instructions

1. With a mixer, cream the Crisco and the butter.
2. Add the sugar vanilla extract and the eggs and beat thoroughly
3. Combine the dry ingredients then sift
4. Add the dry ingredients all at once to the creamed mix with the mixer running
5. Add milk and blend till smooth
6. Pour into a greased and floured tube pan (I used Bakers Joy).
7. Bake at 325° for 90 minutes.

Courses Dessert

Cuisine American

Guess what? You can make this in the kitchen oven if you want.  I use to do quite a lot of camping and if we wanted some type of sweet thing we had to make it in the Dutch oven, cooking on the smoker is basically the same thing. As you can see from the pictures, it was a beautiful cake and adding the powdered sugar was the perfect topping.  The dome lid of the smoker circulates the heat so the cake cooks evenly. Using the tube pan allows the center to cook because the heat is funneled up through it, pound cake is dense, so making sure the heat is evenly distributed makes for a good cake.  Michelle pointed out that there is less chance for the cake to burn because there is no burner on top. So, give this a try and impress your friends.

Until next week take care and be safe.

Steve