Pound Cake

Ingredients:

• 16 oz (by weight) unsalted butter, cut into pieces and softened, plus extra to coat pan(s)
• 16 oz (by weight) cake flour, plus extra to coat pan(s)
• 16 oz (by weight) sugar
• 9 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt

Tools:

• Oven
• 10″ tube pan or 2 9″x5″ loaf pans
• Stand mixer
• Spatula
• Cooling rack

Directions:

Place a rack in the middle of the oven and heat to 350°F.

Coat a 10-inch aluminum tube pan or 2 (9 by 5-inch) loaf pans butter and dust with flour.

Cream together the butter and the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer for 5 minutes on medium speed, using the paddle attachment. Stop once to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. With the mixer running at the lowest speed, add the eggs, 1 at a time, making sure each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next. Again, stopping once to scrape down the sides of the bowl. This will take approximately 3 minutes and the mixture may look curdled. Add the vanilla and salt and beat on medium speed for 30 seconds.

With the mixer on the lowest speed, add the flour in 3 installments, making sure each portion is fully incorporated before adding the next. After the final addition, scrape down the sides of the bowl and then beat for 30 seconds on medium speed until almost smooth.

Scoop the batter into the prepared pan(s), dividing evenly if using 2 pans. Bake for 1 hour or until the internal temperature reaches 210°F on an instant-read thermometer. The crust will be golden brown and will spring back when pressed, but the crack around the center will appear moist.

Remove the cake from the oven to a cooling rack for 10 minutes. Remove the cake from the pan(s) and cool on the rack. Store the cake on the rack covered with a tea towel for up to 3 days.

Serving Suggestions:

• Glaze with Citrus Glaze before serving

Fix for Vista Slowdown When Network in Use

The CPU on my Vista box was going to 100% every time the quantity of network traffic got too high. To fix this, I had to disable the “auto-tuning” feature. Vista uses this feature to decrease the TCP receive window size when it starts getting a lot of invalid traffic. Unfortunately, the feature seems to be defective in certain cases. Here’s the fix:

1. Open a command line as administrator
2. Enter the following command:

   netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

3. Reboot the machine

Problem solved!