This one is a classic, miniaturized. I made this lemon pound cake in mini form to share with a friend, and I like it! It would be the perfect thing to slice up and take to a pot luck, absolutely quintessential and cute.
This recipe is different, because it uses hot melted butter. I love Irish butter or cultured grass fed butter for this, just as long as it’s still unsalted.
Top these off with a scented sugar, like this rosemary one from Nigella Lawson, or a vanilla sugar. Easy to make and a way to fancy up simple desserts, scented sugars can hang out in your pantry for just about forever. Try one, you’ll find ways to use it up (coffee, cookies, berries and ice cream).
These little babies look so quaint. They smell divine too! I love lemon things. Lemon does wonders for lifting my spirits and giving me a break from the gray of winter.
The rosemary sugar makes a glorious crust/crunch on these. You can leave it off, but why? This recipe for the lemon pound cake was slightly adapted from America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and rosemary sugar recipe is from Nigella Lawson’s book, How To Be A Domestic Goddess.
- 1 1/2 cups cake flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 4 large eggs at room temperature
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and hot
- Rosemary sugar topping (optional, recipe follows)
- 3 3/4 cups sugar
- 2-3 sprigs of rosemary
- Heat the oven rack to 350 degrees and put the rack in the middle of the oven. Lightly coat a 9×5 loaf pan or 4 miniature loaf pans* with vegetable oil spray, then line the bottom with parchment paper. Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a large bowl and set aside.
- Process the sugar, eggs, vanilla, lemon zest and juice in a food processor until combined, about 10 seconds. With the machine running, pour the melted butter through the feed tube in a steady stream, about 30 seconds total. Pour the mixture into a large bowl.
- Sift one third of the flour mixture over the egg mixture and whisk in until only a few streaks of the flour mixture remain (you don’t want to over mix the batter.) Continue to mix gently until most lumps are gone.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan or mini-pans and smooth the top. Sprinkle generously with the rosemary sugar in a line down the center of the loaf. Wipe any drops of batter that may have fallen on to the sides of the pan. Bake until a wooden skewer inserted into the center of the cake comes out with a few crumbs attached, 50-60 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through.
- Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then flip out onto a wire rack. Turn the cake right side up, remove the parchment, and let cool to room temperature, about 3 hours.
- Rosemary sugar:
- Fill a glass canning jar with the sugar halfway through. Stick the sprigs of rosemary into the sugar and arrange them so that they fit into the canning jar. Fill the jar with the rest of the sugar. You can use the sugar after two weeks, and store with the rosemary indefinitely.
- *If using mini loaf pans, reduce the baking time to 40 minutes.