For regular readers of this blog, you may remember that over the weekend I made an angel food cake. This meant I was left with over a dozen (yes, over a dozen!!) egg yolks. In baking, egg whites have a little more uses than just the yolks do, so I was a little sad about this. However, then I remembered I could make lemon curd. What’s even better is I found a recipe that made one the best lemon curds I’ve ever had and it even gets folded into a lovely pound cake.

I’ll admit, the whole idea of this was not mine. The chemist bf had been wanting to make pound cake for a long time now and we finally got around to making it. Also a fan of lemon curd, we were able to combine the two things into one tasty bake.

The recipe I chose to use for this bake came from Zoe Francois, one of the hosts on the Magnolia Network. Her show Zoe Bakes has been one of my go-to cooking show watches. It’s also available on Discovery+. I believe this recipe is also available in her cookbook, Zoe Bakes Cakes which is where I found the angel food cake recipe I made as well. Thanks to my local library, i was able to test-drive the cookbook and I’ve decided that it’s one I really need to own. So family members, take note!

Anyway, back to the recipe.

Making and Baking It

This pound cake is a modern take on the traditional pound cake. Where you would use a pound of flour, eggs, butter, and sugar to make one really, really large (and dense!) cake. This version allows for a much lighter and flavorful outcome by using buttermilk, baking powder, and lemon curd.

I really enjoyed making this cake and the lemon curd that went along with it. First, since the lemon curd is an ingredient in the cake, I had to make the lemon curd. Using an electric stove, this took a bit longer than I was hoping for, but in the end the results were worthwhile. After cooling, the curd got really thick and jelly-like.

The cake itself was heavily flavorful with lemon. There was zest, some of the lemon curd, and the cake was even topped with lemon slices that ended up getting baked into the bottom of the cake. This gave the cake a little extra texture that I wasn’t expecting.

That reminds me…

I had to cook lemon slices in a sugar syrup too. The slices baked in a pie plate in a simple syrup for over 45 minutes until they were baked soft. This also removed a lot of the bitterness that would be in normal lemon slices.

Eventually, it was time to put the batter in the oven. Now that I’ve been baking regularly for over two years, I have found that I’m much faster and have less issues coming up in the batter-making and baking process.

This cake baked for a long time. Like a really long time. First, upon placing it in the oven, you lay four or five lemon slices on top of the batter. After 45 minutes, these slices have slipped down into the cake batter. But the cake isn’t done baking at this point. So, you place more on top and finish the baking process. Another 25 minutes or so.

Doing this results in the pretty finish on top of the cake once it comes out of the oven. You can see mine in the picture at the top of this post. I’m still not sure why the cake sunk in the middle. But other than affecting the finished look, it really didn’t matter too much to me.

Tasting It

By the time this cake came out of the oven, it was late at night. So, I didn’t get to try it that day. The next morning, I took my photos and tried a slice and was immediately engulfed in the lemon flavor. The lemon curd, though not texturally present in the finished cake did give the cake a lot of lemon “zing.” The original lemon slices did bake down into the cake and ended up towards the bottom of the finished cake. This does leave you with a little interesting tooth texture that isn’t bad, but just different.

Still, this is one of the best pound cakes I’ve ever eaten. I think it even trumps Ina Garten’s from a few months back.