Moist, tangy-sweet, and served in inch-thick slices.
One of the most delicious things in the entire world is lemon pound cake: moist, tangy but sweet, and served in inch-thick slices . . .
I was thrilled when my mother requested a lemon cake for her birthday. It was a golden (well, all right, more lemony yellow) opportunity to learn to make one of my favorite cakes from scratch. Little did I know how complicated this would be.
Okay, to be fair, how complicated I could make it.
I soon learned that there are many different ways to make a lemon cake, beginning with the composition of the actual ingredient list. Some recipes are based on the standard pound cake recipe—equal parts butter, sugar, flour, and eggs—with some lemon zest thrown in. Others have a moist, close crumb because they’re made with sour cream, cream cheese, natural yogurt, buttermilk, or regular milk. Depending on the recipe, some cakes are baked in loaf tins or bundt pans, while others are poured into round cake tins. And the finishing! Some are soaked in lemon syrup after being baked; others are glazed with lemon water icing. Still others are stacked and filled with buttercream: cream cheese seems to be a popular choice, but my research also uncovered cakes frosted in regular American-style buttercream or Italian meringue as well.
Clearly, this wasn’t going to be as simple as I thought. I needed to start making some decisions.
I started by throwing birthday cake conventions out the window. I wanted my cake to have a rich, moist texture and a denser crumb, similar to that delicious lemon pound cake served by a certain popular coffee shop chain. That cake, and all the others I saw online of its type, contained additional dairy ingredients such as yogurt or buttermilk, and was baked in a loaf pan. Fine. Who says birthday cakes have to be round and flat?
I started looking at recipes for lemon loaf cakes, and found several that looked good, including one by Ina Garten and one by Diana Henry, who may as well be Ina’s Australian equivalent. Both cakes were baked in a loaf pan, used that extra dairy ingredient to guarantee that rich, close texture, and included a lemon soak after baking. The main difference between the two recipes seemed to be that Diana’s called for natural yogurt while Ina’s called for buttermilk. Also, Diana’s recipe measured ingredients through the metric system, while Ina’s used volume.
I love Ina, and her recipes always work. I preferred the idea of buttermilk to natural yogurt (what is that, even?) But I can’t stand measuring by volume.
Forgive me while I go off on a short, well-deserved rant about why we should ALL be using metric measurements:
Baking relies on precision: a careful combination of precisely measured ingredients combined in the correct manner at the correct moment creates a beautiful, delicious thing to eat. When I bake, I am chasing the best version of that delicious thing, so I always want to bake as precisely as I can.
When I measure by grams, I know that every time I make a recipe, I am using the exact correct amount of each ingredient. This raises my chances of getting a consistently good result. When I measure by volume, I cannot be sure I am putting in the correct amount of anything, because measuring by volume does not account for variation in density. If I’m making a cake and my sugar is packed more tightly on one day, I’m going to end up putting in more. My entire recipe might be thrown off.
I could go on, but I’ll stop with this: when there are already so many other variables that can make a bake go wrong, why would I gamble on ingredient measurements, something that I can easily control by buying a $10 kitchen scale?
In the end, Ina’s recipe turned out to be nearly an exact replica of Diana’s, with even the exact amount of buttermilk to yogurt. Mind blown.
The cake turned out bright yellow and delicious: lemony, moist, and super tender. Not a traditional birthday cake, by any means, but absolutely delightful. I hope my mom agrees when she tastes it!
Enjoy!
Lemon Drizzle Loaf Cake*
(Makes 1 loaf cake)
113 grams unsalted butter, room-temperature (1 stick, ½ cup)**
200 grams granulated sugar (~1 cup)
4 tablespoons grated lemon zest (from ~2 large lemons)
2 large eggs, at room temperature
190 grams all purpose flour (~scant 1 ½ cup)
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
½ tsp kosher salt
90 mL buttermilk, at room temperature (~6 tbsp)
2 tbsp lemon juice
½ tsp vanilla extract
Special equipment: hand blender, 1.5 quart loaf pan, parchment paper.
Method
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 1.5 quart loaf pan, and line the bottom with parchment paper. If you need to juice and zest your lemons (and please don’t even think about buying lemon juice ready made from the store!), do so before you begin to mix the cake.
Begin by rubbing the lemon zest and sugar together in a small bowl. If you’ve freshly grated the lemon zest it will still be very moist and might clump when initially added, but keep working until it’s evenly distributed. You want to get the lemon zest completely incorporated so that it truly infuses into the sugar—this will make for a much more lemony cake!
In another bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and whisk together.
Add the butter to the lemon zest and sugar and beat on high with a hand mixer (or you could use a stand mixer with a paddle attachment) until it’s light and fluffy. Because you have the lemon zest added already, you won’t be able to see the butter and sugar lighten as it usually does when you cream the butter and sugar together, so go by the texture.
When the butter, sugar, and zest are light and fluffy, add the eggs at medium speed, one at a time. It’s smart to add a tablespoon of flour between eggs to prevent the mixture from separating.
Combine the buttermilk, vanilla extract, and lemon juice (a liquid measuring glass works beautifully for this).
Once the eggs are incorporated into the batter, add the flour mixture and the buttermilk mixture alternately, a third at a time, ending with the flour. I recommend switching to a rubber spatula to fold in these ingredients. Using an electric mixer (stand or hand) can lead you to overmix the cake, knocking out all the air and encouraging gluten formation. This will lead to a flat, tough cake.
Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove and let cool for 10 minutes in the pan.
For the lemon soak, combine 45 grams sugar and 4 tablespoons lemon juice in a saucepan and heat over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Once the cake has cooled for 10 minutes, spoon the soak over the top of the cake.***
*The ingredients and their rough amounts were originally part of an Ina Garten recipe. I have converted them to metric measurements. The method is mine.
**Volumetric measurements are estimates based on general accepted equivalents. This recipe has not been tested with them.
***To get the lemon soak to penetrate the cake evenly, you’ll need to poke holes in the cake with a cake tester or a toothpick. It doesn’t do a lot for the cake’s aesthetics, but the soak really punches up the cake’s lemon flavor, so it’s absolutely worth it.
Originally posted July 7, 2019.
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