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Why You’ll Love This Recipe
If you’ve come here, you love lemon flavor like I do. This lemon pound cake is easily one my husbands favorites when it comes to the many cakes I make. It’s packed with lemon flavor and is one of the best breakfast loaves I have on the website.
This dense, buttery lemon pound cake is baked to sweet, tangy perfection and topped with a lemon glaze. It takes a while to bake but it is worth it to enjoy this delicious, lemony treat!
Karlynn’s Recipe Notes
- Skill Level: Pound cakes are generally pretty simple to make and this one is no exception (aside from grating some lemon peel). I’d rate this as easy.
- Total Time: This lemon pound cake takes about 1 hour to make.
- Tools Needed: You’ll need a juicer, a grater and a loaf pan.
Lemon Pound Cake
The simplest versions of pound cake quite literally just use a pound of each ingredient, pound cake is all about making a dense, delicious, and filling cake that is almost close to a dense brown bread in thickness and density.
This recipe, however, produces not only a great pound cake but also one drenched in lemon flavor, and a lemon glaze. It should be sweet yet nicely acidic to help keep everything balanced and is the perfect light coffee cake or even a slightly calorific breakfast!
How To Make Lemon Pound Cake
- Grease a standard 9×5 baking pan and set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, add in the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
- Turn the mixer on low and combine all the ingredients together
- Grate the cold butter into the flour mixture and turn the mixer on low
- Mix for 5 minutes, or until the butter is in small pieces throughout the dry mixture
- Add in the lemon zest and mix throughout
- In a large measuring cup, mix together the milk, eggs, and lemon juice until combined
- Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until just combined, scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl with a spatula to make sure everything is combined
- Pour or scoop the batter into the prepared loaf using the spatula to smooth the batter into an even layer
- Bake in the oven at 350 Fahrenheit for 60 minutes, covering the top with aluminum foil if it starts to get a bit too browned
- Bake until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the center comes out totally clean
Making the Lemon Glaze
- Remove from the oven and then combine the ingredients of the glaze in a microwave-safe glass measuring cup
- Microwave in short intervals on high until the sugar has completely dissolved into the lemon juice
- Pour the combined glaze slowly over the top of the pound cake
- If the glaze starts to pool a bit too much, tilt the corner of the pan to pour the remaining glaze back into the measuring cup and re-pour it
Finishing Up
Take a knife and run it along the edges of the cake in the pan to loosen it, and then let it sit for 20 minutes until it is cool enough to touch. Remove the cake onto a baking rack and cool completely and enjoy.
Tent With Tinfoil During Baking
With so much more of the cake in the middle and with so much density, it takes a lot longer for the heat from the oven to work its way into the middle of the cake and properly cook it.
To help prevent your pound cake from burning on top, keep a careful eye on it, especially at around the 30-minute mark. If you think that it looks a bit too brown after only 30 minutes of cooking, feel free to tent it with some aluminum foil to help prevent the top from getting too brown.
Can You Adjust The Flavorings Of The Glaze?
This lemon pound cake is served totally drenched in a tasty lemon glaze, which is very simply made with lemon juice, butter, and sugar. However, if you find that the flavors of the glaze are a bit off-putting, for example, if it is too sweet or too acidic, nothing is stopping you from playing around with it and alerting the flavors to your preference.
Feel free to omit a little bit of lemon juice to help cut down the acidity or to increase the sugar to increase the sweetness. However, you probably don’t want to play around with the butter amount, as adding more butter will turn this glaze from a thin, drizzling sauce to basically just a flavored butter that won’t pour very well.
Happy Baking!
Love,
Karlynn
Lemon Pound Cake
Ingredients
- 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 ½ cups granulated sugar
- 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons lemon zest
- ¾ cup butter, cold
- ¾ cup milk
- 3 large eggs
- ¼ cup lemon juice
Lemon Glaze
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
- 1 teaspoon salted butter
Instructions
- Preheat your oven 350°F. Grease a standard 9×5 baking pan and set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, add in the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Turn the mixer on low and combine the ingredients.
- Grate the cold butter into the flour mixture and turn the mixer on low. Mix for 4-5 minutes, or until the butter is in small pieces throughout the dry mixture. Add in the lemon zest and mix throughout.
- In a large measuring cup, mix together the milk, eggs, and lemon juice until combined.
- Add the liquid into the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until just combined, scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl with a spatula to make sure everything is combined.
- Pour/scoop the batter into the prepared loaf using the spatula to smooth the batter into an even layer.
- Bake in the oven for 60-70 minutes, covering the top with aluminum foil if it starts to get too browned. If your sides are getting too browned as well, turn down your oven to 325 °F after the first 30 minutes. Bake until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven.
- Combine the ingredients of the glaze in a microwave-safe glass measuring cup. Microwave in short intervals on high, stirring between, until the sugar has dissolved into the lemon juice and it's not gritty.
- Pour slowly over the top of the still hot lemon bread in the pan. If the glaze pools, tilt the corner of the pan and pour what's remaining on top back into the measuring cup, then pour on top again. Repeat until only a small amount remains around the edges.
- Take a knife and run along the edges of the cake in the pan now to loosen it, and to let the remaining glaze drizzle around and down the sides of the loaf .
- Let the cake sit in the pan for 20 minutes until cool enough to touch. The glaze will sink into the top of the loaf during this time. Run a knife around the edges of the loaf again to completely detach it and tip to remove from the pan. Place the cake onto a baking rack and cool completely.
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Wendy says
Nice recipe!
I’ll use buttermilk in place of the plain milk for softness.
Thanks!