But one family has been making anything but a plain old pound cake for 93 years. The Stocks sell thousands of iced bars of pound cake every week, and I set out for the secret.
A father, his two sons, daughter and granddaughter all hold the key to their Kensington jewel, and I tried my best to crack the confectionary code.
"The pound cake is great, it's fabulous," says one customer. "I have had pound cake everywhere else, this is the best."
The Stock family has kept the secret to their famous pound cake SO under wraps for more than 90 years, it's practically air tight.
"We can give you a peek at different things but that we have to keep to ourselves," says Kris DeCarles, a fourth generation Stock.
I couldn't get near the batter, but dad, Karl, did give us a peek at the baking process. He says it's the parchment paper that keeps it so light and moist.
"We don't have to put any flour grease or anything into the cake," Karl says.
Because they bake roughly 3,000 cakes a week, the Stocks custom-created the perfect oven to pound them out.
"The only one I know like it is out in Disneyworld," he says."We had to cut it to make it fit in the building."
The Stocks have been living and making a living in the same building since Karl's grandfather Josef opened up shop in 1918.
"We literally grew up in a bakery," Kris says.
But it was Karl's father Frank who perfected the pound.
"You cut this cake," he says. "There are no crumbs. You would have to smack it to get crumbs out of it!"
I also scooped out their trick to getting the sweet, creamy icing the whitest of whites.
"It is like when you do your laundry and your fabric softener is blue, we add a little blue food coloring to it to make it whiter," Kris says.
Feel free to stop by:
Stock's Bakery
2614 East Lehigh Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19125-3812
(215) 634-7344
