The Best Lemon Pound Cake | For Serious Lemon Lovers

Watch my best lemon pound cake web story here.

Hi Jenni, I love this recipe so much. Thanks to you I got the highest grade for my external exam using this recipe.

Reader and Culinary Student Donna

What Makes This Recipe So Great

The key to making the best any-kind-of-pound-cake is to layer in the main flavor/s in as many ways as possible. In the case of lemon pound cake, you could absolutely just use some lemon extract and call it a day.

But, if you want to achieve the most lemony, best lemon pound cake in all the land, you’ll have to do a bit more than just that.

This cake has lemon in all its forms:

• lemon zest, and lots of it. This is where all the essential oils live, in the yellow outside skin
• lemon juice, because just using the zest gives you the perfume of lemon but not the sourness. Using juice brings the tartness you expect from a lemon dessert
• lemon extract or lemon oil, but only a touch. I find that using too much of either one can taste artificial, so I use just enough to give the lemon flavor a bit of punch

And last, because we love the tartness of lemon so much, I add an additional tart ingredient. In the video, I used Greek yogurt.

You can also achieve that lovely tang by using buttermilk and, to a lesser extent, sour cream.

Of course, the glaze is a great place to reinforce the flavor of the cake, so the holy trinity of zest, juice, and extract or oil come to play in the glaze, too.

How Did You Make It Yellow?

Worry not. No artificial dyes were sacrificed to make this lemon pound cake a sunny, lemon yellow.

I added a mere 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric to the sugar and butter mixture. The cake, which would already be a pale yellow because of the zest and egg yolks only need a little bit of urging to look like sunshine.

And no, you cannot taste the turmeric at all.

Procedure

Ingredients

Here’s what you’ll need to make the best and most lemony lemon pound cake you’ll ever taste.

• unsalted butter: make sure it’s cool butter. You don’t want it soft, just pliable. Keep the temp between 65-68F.
• sugar: regular granulated. It’s the action of creaming the butter together with the crystalline sugar that tears holes in the butter, which in turn allows for an even rise and crumb once the rest of the ingredients are added
• fine sea salt: you can also use table salt. If you sub with kosher salt, you’ll have to use a touch more since kosher salt crystals are larger and don’t pack together as tightly
• lemon zest: use a Microplane to get small, feathery pieces of zest.
• lemon extract: substitute lemon oil if you like. But only use about 3 drops since it’s more concentrated than lemon extract
• eggs: I use large eggs. Take them out of the fridge a good 45 minutes to an hour before baking
• cake flour: you can also use all-purpose flour. Your cake won’t have quite as fine a texture, but the difference is very slight
• baking powder: leavener
• baking soda: the baking soda is here primarily to counteract the acidity from all the lemon components. Make sure your baking soda doesn’t have any lumps in it
• Greek yogurt: full fat or low fat. Don’t sub fat-free. You can also use buttermilk if you have it, or a mixture of the two
• lemon juice: Provides the rest of the liquid as well as tart, lemon flavor
• turmeric: 1/2 teaspoon provides a sunny lemon color without any flavor that I can detect, and my palate is pretty sensitive. You could also use a few drops of yellow food coloring or just leave coloring out altogether. Your call.

Procedure

Like most butter cakes, this one is made using the creaming method.

In short, here are the steps:

1. cream together butter, sugar, salt, lemon zest, optional turmeric, and extract. Fat carries flavor, so it makes sense to add the salt, zest, and extract at the same time you add the butter
2. Whip eggs well then drizzle them into the batter, a little at a time.
3. Whisk together dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, and baking soda.
4. Whisk together the Greek yogurt and lemon juice. Note, you can make this cake with buttermilk in place of the Greek yogurt as well.
5. Alternate adding the dry and wet ingredients in 5 additions, beginning and ending with dry. (dry-wet-dry-wet-dry)
6. Scrape batter evenly into your prepared pan.

Visual How-To

• Put the sugar, lemon zest, salt, and lemon extract in your mixer bowl. Mix well so the zest perfumes the sugar and it turns a very pale yellow.
• Add the butter and turmeric, if using.
• Beat on medium speed until light and fluffy.

NOTE: The sugar will not completely dissolve during this stage because there is not enough water in the butter to dissolve it all the way.

• Beat the eggs together.
• Add them in small additions, beating well between each. Scrape the bowl every once in a while. Adding the eggs should take about five minutes.
• Notice how much creamier the batter looks at this point. Nice and thick and billowy.
• Add the flour and leavening and Greek yogurt/buttermilk and lemon juice mixture alternately, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

NOTE: Only allow a few seconds between one addition before adding the next. The mixture won’t be completely combined, but that’s okay.

Once everything is in, scrape the bowl really well, making sure to get down to the bottom.

Then turn the mixer on high for about 3 seconds. That will be enough to bring everything together beautifully.

• The batter will be thick and billowy. Scrape it evenly into your pan-sprayed-and-well-floured 12-cup Bundt pan and then spread it out evenly.
• Bake until deep golden brown and well-risen with a sunshiny crack all around the center of the cake.

Let the cake cool in the pan for about 20 minutes before turning it out onto a rack to cool.

NOTE: For a very moist cake, wrap the still-hot cake with plastic wrap, The wrap will prevent evaporation as the cake cools, leaving all the moisture in the cake where it belongs.

Equipment You May Need

You can certainly make this cake–most cakes, really–with a hand mixer, but nothing does as good a job at creaming butter and sugar together than a stand mixer.

This is the one I recommend:

This pound cake, like almost all my pound cake recipes, is scaled to fit in a 12-cup Bundt pan. Most of the specialty Bundts only hold 10 cups, so make sure you have a “classic” Bundt pan or be prepared to have leftover batter to make into a few cupcakes.

Variations

You can use this same recipe to make a lime, orange, or even grapefruit pound cake. Just swap out the zest, juice, and extract.

As written, it will work with any citrus, so you can make your favorite.

Tips for Success

Make sure your butter, eggs, lemon juice, and yogurt or buttermilk are all at cool room temperature before you start. That way, you won’t be adding cold stuff on top of butter than you worked so hard to cream. It’ll just seize back up again, and your batter will get all curdled looking.

Bake the cake on the rack that is one below dead center of the oven. That way, the center of the pan will be in the center of the oven, and you’ll get the most even bake possible.

Lemon Pound Cake Q & A

Serving Suggestions

This cake doesn’t need much accompaniment, honestly.

I like a tart lemon glaze made with just powdered sugar, lemon zest, a tiny pinch of salt, and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

You could also frost the cake if you’d like. I think a heavy frosting would overpower the velvety texture of the cake, so maybe frost it with some stabilized whipped cream or serve slices with some whipped cream.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this or any other recipe or post on the site, there are a few ways to get in touch.

You can leave a comment on the post, and I’ll be back in touch within 24 hours.

If your question is more pressing, don’t hesitate to email me, and I should be back in touch within 4 hours (unless I’m asleep) or often much more quickly than that.

A Note About Measurements

This is the kitchen scale that I recommend for home cooks and bakers. Using a scale will help you be more accurate and consistent in your measurements.

It is lightweight, easy to store, accurate, and very easy to use.

I hope you’ve learned something from this post or that you’ve decided to make the recipe.

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Thank you so much for being here and for helping others find my recipes by sharing on your social platforms!

So, there you have it. I hope you love this sunshiny lemon pound cake as much as we do!

Thanks so much for watching and reading. I hope you have a lovely day.

See my best lemon Bundt cake recipe web story here.