Lemon Pound Cake

Instructions

1. Set your oven rack to one below the center and preheat the oven to 350F.
2. Spray a 12-cup Bundt-type pan thoroughly with pan spray, then flour your pan very well. Knock out the excess flour. If you only have a 10-cup Bundt-type pan, you’ll have about 1 1/2 cups of batter left over. You can use this to make a 6″ cake or maybe 4-5 cupcakes. Go ahead and prepare those pans if necessary. *Set aside.
3. Cream together butter, sugar, salt, zest and extract/oil until very light and fluffy. Take your time here; it could take 10 minutes or more. You want your creamed mixture to be very pale in color (this lets you know that you’ve incorporated a lot of air into the mix) and very thick and fluffy. Scrape down your mixing bowl as necessary.
4. While the butter mixture is creaming, whisk together your flour, baking powder and baking soda. If after whisking, the flour seems a bit lumpy, go ahead and sift the dry ingredients. Set aside.
5. Whisk together the yogurt/sour cream, lemon juice and whole milk. Set aside.
6. Once the butter/sugar mixture is beautifully light, drizzle in the beaten eggs, a bit at a time, over a period of about 5 minutes. Scrape the bowl as necessary.
7. Alternately add the dry and wet ingredients, beginning and ending with dry, in this manner:
8. Add half the dry
9. Add half the wet
10. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients
11. Add the rest of the wet ingredients
12. Add the rest of the dry ingredients.
13. Mix on low for only about 5 seconds between additions. Scrape the bowl as necessary, making sure to get down to the bottom, but don’t worry too much about completely mixing.
14. Once all your ingredients are combined, scrape the bowl and fold by hand for a few seconds.
15. Put the bowl back on the mixer and mix on high speed for no more than three seconds.
16. Scrape the batter into your prepared pan(s).
17. Bake for about an hour until the cake is well risen, deeply golden brown and has a crack running around the center of the top of the cake (pound cakes do this. It’s okay). A thin knife or a skewer inserted into Said Crack should come out clean.
18. Let the cake cool in the pan for 20 minutes (10 minutes if you’ve made a small extra cake) then turn the cake out.
19. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate until cool. I promise this will not give you a soggy cake, just a very moist and wonderful cake.

Optional

1. When just barely warm, you can glaze the cake with a mixture of powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, just a pinch of salt.