Lemon Cream Cheese Pound Cake

Pound cake is the little black dress of southern baking.  Like a LBD, a pound cake can be casual and plain, or they can be dressed up with flavor, like the lemon cream cheese pound cake recipe I am sharing today.  

Everyone (and their mama) has a lemon pound cake recipe, some were passed down from generation to generation, while some are modern rifts on the classic.  I can’t tell you how many church functions growing up, ended with a dessert table filled with pound cakes. Funerals, weddings, potlucks, family reunions, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Somehow magically, there was always a pound cake.   

The “pound” in pound cake literally means the recipe  includes an actual pound of the basic ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs and flour.  For math purposes, this makes everything so simple, but that simplicity comes with a cost.  Pound cakes are notorious for coming out dry. If I’m going to spend this many calories (a pound of butter and sugar) then I want the pound cake to be worth it.  Satisfying. Flavorful. But most importantly, not dry. 

Even though all pound cake recipes have a similar structure, over the years people have tinkered with the recipe and passed those tweaks down.  One of the most awkward things in the world is to have someone boast about making their granny’s pound cake, only to find it’s dry. 

I literally have the worst poker face in the history of the world and when  I am faced with a pound cake that happens to be dry, things can go sidewides.  *Insert Chrissy Tiegen meme here* Can someone tell me what to do? Because the answer is not to say “it’s a little dry”.  For the record, that is the wrong thing to do. I think some people manage to choke down the whole slice to save feelings. 

Listen: A dry cake happens to the best of us.  Cake fails happen to me all the time, even when I have a recipe memorized.  Failing is a part of the process. I usually snap a quick picture, take a couple of notes on what went wrong and then tweak my process to try to reach the Southern Pound Cake Lady Status. 

The Goal: 

Produce a wonderfully moist (do people still hate the word “moist”?) pound cake, packed with a fantastically fresh lemon flavor. 

Here's how we're going to achieve our goal: 

1. Replacing some of the butter with cream cheese.  By including cream cheese you combat the potential for dryness. 
2. Use the best butter you can afford.  I love nothing more than paying $2.50 for butter from the discount store because I experiment a lot, so I want to keep my expenses down, however the cheaper the butter, the less milk fat, which means your cake won’t have as much moisture as it could. 
3. Bake Low and Slow.  I’ve found that a 350ºF  oven is too hot for pound cake.  By reducing the oven temp to 300ºF for 1 hour and 25 minutes, you build a solid crust on the pound cake without over drying the cake.  1 hour and 25 minutes seems insane, but it is worth it, when you are enjoying a nice slice of cake. 
4. Flavor is the everything.  I love lemon pound cake, but I don’t love it when the pound cake tastes like what I imagine lemon pledge tastes like.  You can definitely go too far. I like using a bit of lemon extract, a lot of lemon zest and a bit of lemon juice. Using all three provides a more fragrant and flavorful cake. 
5. If all else fails and you end up over baking your cake, simple syrup is your best friend.  Simple syrup is basically a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water brought to a rapid boil and then cooled.  Use a toothpick to poke a few holes in the top of the cooling cake and brush the cake with the syrup.  The cake will soak up the simple syrup providing a bit of ‘insurance’ against a dry cake. 

Process notes: 

Everything needs to be room temperature!  Set out the butter and cream cheese 2 hours before you are ready to make the cake. My MIL puts her cream cheese on the counter before she goes to work -- that might be a tad bit extreme-- but no one has ever died from her poundcake. 

 A couple short-cuts: 

1. Eggs. Put all of the eggs in a large measuring cup or bowl and cover with room temperature water.  Set aside. 
2. Butter.  Unwrap the butter and cut into roughly 2 tablespoon pats and put on a plate.  Set the plate on the stove while the oven is preheating. OR You can microwave in 5-7 second bursts, until the butter softens.   I tend to use the stove method more often because it’s really easy to microwave too much. The butter needs to be soft, not melted.
3. Cream Cheese.  Unwrap the cream cheese block and place it on a plate.  Set the plate on the stove while the oven is preheating.   Technically you can microwave cream cheese in 7-10 second bursts. But like I said above, sometimes it’s too much. 

Creaming the sugar and butter together is probably the most important step.  That mixture needs to be fluffy, light and the sugar completely dissolved. If you’re using a stand mixer set a timer for 4 minutes and re-evaluate.

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