The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #6: Pastel Pound Cake

From the beginning, I was excited to make this recipe. Compared to dishes like the Ladyfinger Dessert and the Mint Julep Dessert, a simple fruit-flavored pound cake sounded refreshingly normal.

It's pretty much your basic pound cake recipe, only with a packet of Jell-O thrown in! This came together in a jiffy and made a lovely Bundt cake. It was so lovely, in fact, that when I took it to work I only came home with one leftover piece, which was perfect because I wanted seconds. The only issue with it was that even though I greased my cake pan, a little chunk of the cake ripped off when I dumped the cake out. Maybe I simply need to be more careful or let the cake cool a little more in the pan before trying to remove it.

I used the orange flavor because I hadn't had it in a while and I thought it would go well with the lemon glaze. I made the recipe exactly as written. This recipe has the distinction of being the first (but ceratinly not the last) Jell-O recipe I have encountered that calls for an ingredient with which I am not familiar. I don't know what salad oil was or what its modern equivalent might be, but I figured since canola works in every other cake recipe I know, it would work in this one, and fortunately it did. At some point there may come a time when I truly cannot get ahold of some of the ingredients for these older recipes (like spiced peaches as called for in the 1917 Jell-O cookbook), but luckily that wasn't the case here.

Honestly, there's nothing I would change about this recipe. It's a Good Dessert just the way it is. It's very easy and quick to make, and one of my co-workers thought it tasted so good that he didn't believe me at first when I told him I didn't get it at a bakery. It would probably be good with any Jell-O flavor, with or without the glaze. One note, though: the glaze is quite strongly lemony, and it makes a lot of glaze, so if you are not into lemon drops, you might want to reduce the lemon juice by one-third or just find a different glaze recipe.

So, now the bad news: I lost my photos of the finished cake. It looks golden brown on the outside and pastel orange on the inside with a somewhat moist crumb and a generous dose of glaze. If When I make this cake again, I will grab some photos of it and update this post, just for the sake of completeness.