If you’ve caught an episode or two of her Food Network or Discovery shows, you might know Giada De Laurentiis as a pasta pro and antipasto ace. But as we learned on an episode of the Allrecipes Homemade podcast, the chef, cookbook author, mom, and entrepreneur is all about balance: Work and rest. Carbs and vegetables. Limoncello and lemon water.
And recently, she’s reminding us that she’s also a whiz at savory and sweet.
“My Aunt Raffy had been telling me about a cherry pound cake that her nonna and mother had made long ago, and wanted me to try my hand at re-creating it! After all, it’s the perfect season for it — fresh cherries are super abundant, and I love baking with fresh seasonal produce,” De Laurentiis says of her Italian Cherry Pound Cake she shared on Instagram. “This is a wonderful pound cake with the slight flavor of almond. I adore the combination of almond and cherry.”
Here at Allrecipes, we’re wild about a great heirloom recipe — especially of the dessert variety. (See also: This fan-favorite Grandmother’s Pound Cake II.) And we’re also wild about cherries, and this cake can be dressed up for fresh or frozen so it’s possible to savor a slice any time of the year.
TikTok celeb @thepastaqueen chimed in on Instagram to say, “Looks delicious 😍,” while another fan raved, “I made this cherry pound cake and it was delicious! 😋. It inspired me to purchase a cherry 🍒 pitter.”
Since De Laurentiis workshopped this family recipe to be doable for modern cooks and busy moms like herself, she discovered a few tricks of the trade:
Coat your cherries. “To ensure that the cherries don’t sink in the batter or bleed their color everywhere, I opt to toss them in a bit of flour first, and add them to the cake in layers. It makes for a perfectly, evenly-dispersed slice every time, and it’s just beautiful to slice into,” she explains on her website.
Pit like a pro. “You don’t need to purchase a cherry pitter if you don’t have one. I like to take the stem off of the cherry, and place it on top of a small glass bottle — a 10-12 ounce one you’d get something like beer in — and use a chopstick or metal straw and press down on the center of the cherry until the pit pops off the bottom. You could also simply cut them in half and remove the pit that way,” she adds. “However you get the pit out, the cake will turn out delicious!”
Add enough extract. A three-to-one ratio of vanilla extract to almond extract in the cake batter will yield delicious results, De Laurentiis says.
Fans who have rated the cake worthy of 5 stars on Giadzy.com have been putting their own signature on the dessert — just as the best family heirloom recipes allow you to do.
“Yummy! I substituted full-fat Greek yogurt for the sour cream and added some sliced almonds on the top,” one says. Each slice offers the “perfect balance of flavors among the cherries and almond extract,” according to another home baker. “The sour cream adds the right amount of dense texture. If someone ordered it to be sweeter, one could drizzle a simple confectionery almond glaze. Personally, I enjoyed the lower sugar content allowing the cherries to be the sweet stars!”
Get the recipe for De Laurentiis’ Italian Cherry Pound Cake here.
Listen to Allrecipes Homemade podcast to hear more from Giada!
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