I wanted to reduce my lemon cake recipe to make enough servings for the two of us, instead of the large bundt cake we were accustomed to. I asked my friend Marianne to give the challenge to her son Eli who homeschools her grandchildren Nina and Mat. Here is the result. Bravo!
Dear (Wild Cooking Lady), We were delighted to receive your lemon pound cake recipe. Lemon is one of our household’s favorite flavors. We heard you were having problems reducing the cake’s yield without losing flavor or texture so we designed an experiment to address the issue.
First we made the basic recipe. We did not use the optional ingredients, nor did we use the lemon zest, as we did not have a lemon at the time. We cut the cake into four sections. We put the syrup on two of the sections and taste tested one of those. We then put the rest in the freezer.
Then we used math to find the 1/3 recipe. We baked it in a mini bundt tin (yielded 7 single serve cakes, baked for 28 minutes), as opposed to a normal fluted bundt pan that we used for our control. It was too big to use for the smaller recipe. We did not notice any significant differences, though the texture seemed more like lightly undercooked bread. Again, we did not use the optional ingredients nor the zest, in order to maintain our control (and we still did not have a lemon).
Finally, we used what we had learned to adapt a final recipe. It is as follows:
1 cup flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt
1/3 cup buttermilk
zest of 1 lemon
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
We recommend a baking time of 20-25 minutes. Again it yielded 7 mini bundt cakes. (A muffin tin would likely accomplish the same). It was a big winner. Fluffy, delicious, top notch. Would make again. 5 stars. It is fluffier and more airy than the original, but we still recommend it.
As far as storing it goes, we found that freezing the cake before syruping, thawing on the counter for at least 1 hour 45 minutes, and then syruping gave us a palatable cake. Obviously never as good as fresh, but much better than freezing after syruping and thawing on the counter for the same amount of time. We also thawed the final quarter of the control cake using our microwave’s autodefrost setting (about 5 and a half minutes). It came out rubbery and we did not like it. We did not test freezing our final recipe. We only tested freezing our control, but would still recommend based on that information freezing the cake before syruping it, and thawing on the counter.
Final notes: We always make our own buttermilk with 1 tbsp lemon juice per 1 cup milk, and we recommend that for this recipe specifically as well. We used cold butter each time, chopped into cubes to beat with the sugar. We did not use the glaze at all, just the syrup, as our focus was on flavor and texture and not seeing how much glaze my kids can eat in a week.
Thank you so much for sharing your recipe and letting us do this project for you! It was super fun and delicious.