Lemon Pound Cake

Recently I have been having a bad run with what I like to call “The Sh*ts”.  This is when a bunch of bad things happen to someone consecutively, not giving them time to get over it.  Sometimes the events increase in the level of well, crap, and greatly reduces the crap tolerance of the individual.  I tend to want to bake then as I find it an escape route of temporarily not dealing with things that make me incredibly unhappy.

lemon pound cake – sliced

This time I wanted to try Joy The Baker’s lemon pound cake recipe.  It had been emailed to me, and as I had most of the ingredients on hand (minus the lemons), it was an easy way to get out my frustrations and get what would hopefully be a yummy finished product at the end.  I also made more milk-bread rolls which were actually tastier than the lemon pound cake.  You can find the original recipe above.

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar (I used organic white granulated)

zest of 1 large lemon (I used two)

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped and pod discarded (or 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract)

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

Directions

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees F.   Grease a standard 9×13 bread pan.  (Joy says to use a springboard pan, but as I wanted a loaf of pound cake, I used a bread pan.)

In the bowl of an electric stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (or using an electric hand mixer) beat the butter until pliable and soft, about 1 minute.

Mix/Toss sugar and lemon zest.  For more “lemony smell” add extra zest (hence my extra lemon).

lemon zest & sugar

Add the sugar to the butter and beat on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes.  Scrape the sides of the mixture to make sure everything gets beaten.

zest, sugar, butter

Add eggs, one at a time, beating for 1 minute between each addition.  Add vanilla extract once all of the eggs are mixed in.  The batter may look curdled as mentioned by Joy, and it kind of does but it will come together at the end!

Add the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Beat on low speed until almost incorporated.  Add the lemon juice and beat to combine.   Use a silicone spatula to evenly get all the goodies that may not have made it to the beater and mix slow to incorporate everything.

adding flour

Spread the batter into the prepared pan and smooth.  Allow to bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.  Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before removing from the pan to cool completely on a wire rack.  I made the mistake of wanting to get that nice brown crust like hers around the edge, and so I left my cake in the oven a little too long.  It came out still somewhat moist, but I feel like I could have either used one more stick of butter or taken it out sooner.  In addition, I will probably take out 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar as it was a bit too sweet for my taste buds.

batter

final

One thing that I wasn’t sure about was why she recommended AP flour instead of cake flour.  I always thought that cake flour was more fine and would come out fluffier, but perhaps that is not what we are looking for in a pound cake?  Comments would help!

Hope your cake comes out more pound-cakey than mine.  It still tastes delicious with a glass of milk though!

R/g

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25 Apr This entry was published on April 25, 2014 at 13:10. It’s filed under bakings, recipes, The Gastronome and tagged bakings, Joy The Baker, lemon pound cake, pound cake, recipes. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.