Buttermilk Pound Cake with Lemon Glaze
A dense, tight-crumbed loaf that gets its lift from eggs and a long creaming, not a shortcut.
- Serves
- 16
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 1 hr 20 min
- Written
Method
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Heat the oven to 325°F and grease and flour a 10-inch tube or bundt pan, tapping out the excess.
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Cream the butter and sugar together on medium-high until pale and noticeably fluffy, about 5 minutes — don’t shortcut this, it’s most of the cake’s rise.
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Beat in the eggs one at a time, letting each fully disappear into the batter before adding the next.
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Whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together in a separate bowl.
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Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture in three additions, alternating with the buttermilk and beginning and ending with flour, mixing just until combined.
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Stir in the vanilla and lemon zest, then scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
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Bake until a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back when pressed, 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes, tenting loosely with foil if the top is browning too fast.
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Cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.
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Whisk the powdered sugar with the lemon juice until smooth and pourable, then drizzle over the cooled cake.
Notes
The long creaming is the whole trick — a pound cake gets its structure almost entirely from air beaten into the butter before the eggs go in, since there’s no baking powder doing the heavy lifting. Rush that step and the crumb turns dense in the wrong way, more brick than cake. Room-temperature eggs matter too: cold ones seize the butter and knock the air right back out.
It keeps well under a cake dome for a few days, the crumb actually tightening up and improving on day two. No lemon on hand: skip the glaze and dust the top with powdered sugar instead, or swap in orange zest and juice.