A few days ago, a cousin of mine visited and stayed for a while along with her 9-year-old daughter.
Her job brings her everywhere, and this includes out-of-the-state and out-of-the-country places. She and her husband both have demanding jobs and they rarely see their little girl anymore. Whenever she has the opportunity to bring her daughter with her, she always takes it.For the week that they were with us, I was the one who took care of my niece. She’s a behaved young girl and is quite the bookworm. So give her a book and she’s all settled.
It’s quite nice to watch her and my sons doing different things, but staying together at one side of the living room. They were all behaving and just doing their own things. I decided to reward them by baking them a cake that they could eat for their afternoon snack. I decided on a simple pound cake since it was a weekday and I didn’t have much time to bake something complicated. It’s a recipe that I found over at Marie’s Cuisine. It’s made with cream cheese and vanilla bean.
They all loved the cake, even asking for another slice. They said it doesn’t taste so sweet and it’s so moist! They ate theirs with a cup of milk, while I ate mine with a cup of coffee.
If you want a copy of this recipe, please flip over to the next page!

You can serve this to your friends when they visit you and you don’t have the time to make a really complicated dessert dish. This is a favorite among my friends because it’s one of my go-to recipes whenever they visit. It’s moist and just has the right amount of sweetness in it. And the richness because of the cream cheese just makes it even more better. You have to try this for your family too and I will sure they will thank you for this!
See what our friends from Marie’s Cuisine have to say about this recipe:
“There are days when you don’t need a special occasion to want to eat cake. Today is one of those days and nothing was going to stop me from making this cake.”
Every time my family craves for something, I always bake a cake. This is one of their favorites because it’s not that difficult to make and at the same time, it’s creamy and decadent.

Ingredients
Ingredients for the cake:

• 1 ½ cups Land O Lakes butter, softened
• 8 oz Philadelphia cream cheese, softened
• 2 ½ cups Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar
• 1 tsp McCormick vanilla extract
• 1 tsp McCormick almond extract
• 6 Eggland’s eggs
• 3 cups Gold Medal all-purpose flour

Ingredients for the glaze:

• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 tbsp Borden heavy cream
• 2 tbsps Borden milk
• 1 1/2 cups Domino powdered sugar

Optional chocolate drizzle:

• Just a bit of Hershey’s chocolate spread

Instructions
Directions for the cake:
Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter and flour the bundt cake pan.
Cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar for about 5 minutes (until very light and fluffy).
Stir in the vanilla and almond extract.
Add the flour and the eggs alternately, beginning and ending with the flour. Do not over-mix!
Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for 65 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out clean.
Let the cake cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then flip on a baking rack to cool completely before glazing.
Directions for the glaze:
Pour the milk into a bowl and scrape in the vanilla bean. Let it steep for an hour or more to let the flavor intensify.
Add the powdered sugar and whisk with a fork until thick.
Fill a plastic bag with the glaze, make a tiny cut in the corner and drizzle away. Mine turned out very meh so I used chocolate spread too.
Optional chocolate drizzle:
Microwave a bit of chocolate spread for 30 seconds, transfer to a plastic bag, cut the corner and drizzle on top of the cooled cake.