If you love lemons and you love pound cake, this Famous Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake recipe is calling your name! This old-fashioned pound cake is as popular today as it was in the 1920s. Make it yourself to see why!

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Homemade Lemon Pound Cake

I love an excellent pound cake. Moist and dense, it cuts cleanly. It must be all the butter! (Can one go wrong with butter?) It goes perfectly well  served alongside a scoop of vanilla or dulce de leche ice cream, whipped cream, and lemon curd. 

I am a big fan of pound cakes and made several other pound cake recipes. I like to make them as the seasons change so I can use different seasonal fruits: Blueberry Pound Cake, Glazed Lemon, and Sugared Cranberry. Each is unique and I don’t like playing favorites. But if you ask me today, this Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake is one of the greats.

What Is Pound Cake, Exactly?

It would seem like the amount of heavy, wet ingredients in this cake — like the 5 eggs, milk, and cup and a half of butter and vegetable shortening — would weigh it down or cause it not to rise. However, something magical happens in the baking process that results in a fluffy cake with a fine crumb that melts in your mouth with each bite!

What Makes This Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake Recipe Famous?

The recipe for this 1920 Famous Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake recipe has been floating around the internet for years. I love that the recipe is simple. But the first time I made this 1920 Famous Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake Recipe, I somehow doubled the shortening. I didn’t even realize about the extra half cup of shortening until my kitchen started filling with smoke about halfway through the baking time. The excess oil seeped out of the tube pan, burning on the bottom of the oven. So, do as I say (and not as I did!).

I like to drizzle this Lemon Pound Cake with fresh lemon slices and mint, but a powdered sugar glaze, fresh berries, lemon curd, freshly whipped cream or even vanilla ice cream would also be delicious! This Lemon Pound Cake recipe is a classic dessert that’s super easy to make for any occasion. It’s perfect for get-togethers with family and friends, holidays (especially Easter and Christmas), and birthdays!

Key Ingredients

• Butter + Shortening: You’ll need one cup of butter and half a cup of vegetable shortening for this recipe. The butter adds a ton of rich flavor and beautiful yellow color to the pound cake. And the shortening hels the top get crisp and gives this pound cake it signature dense crumb.
• Sugar: Use white, granulated sugar for this recipe. It creams well with the butter for a light, fluffy texture. And it won’t change the color of the cake like brown sugar would.
• Eggs: True to its name, you’ll need 5 eggs for this pound cake recipe. Add them one at a time to make sure they’re incorporated into the batter.
• Dry Ingredients: Whisk or sift together your all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate before adding to the batter. 
• Cake Flour: Cake flour inherently contains less protein than all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour, which means less gluten formation and a bouncier sponge cake texture. It also contains the leavening agents like baking soda and baking powder, as well as salt.
• Heavy Whipped Cream: Just half of a cup keeps this pound cake moist with a fine crumb, and keeps it from drying out.
• Lemon Zest + Lemon Juice: You’ll need both fresh lemon zest and juice for this Lemon Pound Cake recipe. Make sure to wash your lemons well and roll them on the counter before zesting and juicing. This ensures that you’ll get the most juice from your lemons.
• Whole Milk: Alternate one cup of whole milk, or a half cup of milk plus a half cup of heavy whipping cream (or just a cup of half-and-half) with the dry ingredients, starting and ending with the flour mixture.
• Garnish: Decorate your Ritz Carlton Pound Cake with thin lemon slices, fresh mint leaves, and/or a powdered sugar glaze made from whisking together milk or heavy cream, powdered sugar, lemon juice, and vanilla extract.

How To Make the Best Lemon Pound Cake

1. Preheat your oven to 350ºF, and prepare your tube pan or bundt pan by greasing with butter or shortening and dusting with flour to prevent the pound cake from sticking.
2. Next, in your stand mixer with the paddle attachment attached, cream your room temperature unsalted butter with the shortening and sugar until creamy and smooth. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl so everything can get nicely incorporated.
3. Next, it’s time to add the sifted dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternating with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. (Pro tip: you always want to start with the dry ingredients and end with the dry ingredients when alternating with the wet ingredients.) Mix just until combined after each addition. It’s OK to see some streaks of flour.
4. Remove the mixing bowl from the stand mixer, and gently (but thoroughly) fold in the lemon juice and lemon zest by hand with a spatula.
5. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well until incorporated after each addition.
6. Pour the batter into a previously greased pan, and bake anywhere from 55-70 minutes or until the cake gets golden brown on the top. Leave the cake to cool in the pan for few minutes. Then, gently separate the cake from the pan and transfer the cake on a rack.
7. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 15 minutes before inverting the pan on a wire rack to cool completely. Garnish with mint and lemon, serve by the slice, and enjoy!

Tips for Making the Best Lemon Pound Cake

• Measure all the ingredients carefully beforehand, and have them at room temperature — especially the butter and eggs in this case — to prevent lumps.
• For a tender cake, don’t over-mix the batter. Mix on low speed and until ingredients are just incorporated.
• Bake on your middle oven rack, and start checking at the 55-minute mark, but if the top isn’t even golden brown, don’t open your oven yet. (Opening and closing the oven to check a cake before it’s done causes it to fall.)
• Grease and flour a bundt pan or tube cake pan so that the cake doesn’t stick to the sides. A tube cake pan has two pieces which makes it simple to remove the cake.
• Cool the cake before removing it from the pan. Gently loosen the sides with a knife, then lift out the middle piece. Run your knife around the center tube and between the bottom of the cake to loosen.

More Cake Recipes To Try

• Sugared Cranberry Pound Cake
• Candied Lemon Cheese Cake
• Brick Street Chocolate Cake
• Chocolate Cupcakes
• Lemon Pound Cake
• Blueberry Pound Cake
• Candied Lemon Cheesecake

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1920 Famous Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake Recipe

If you love lemons and you love pound cake, this 1920 Famous Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake recipe is calling your name! This dense, old-fashioned buttery lemon pound cake was a hit at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the 1920s, and it's still popular today.

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 cup unsalted butter at room temperature
• 1/2 cup shortening at room temperature
• 5 large eggs at room temperature
• 1 cup whole milk or 1/2 cup milk plus 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• 6 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
• Zest of 1 lemon

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350°F.
• Grease and flour a tube pan (angel food cake pan) or Bundt pan. Set aside.
• Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl. Set aside.
• Using an electric or stand mixer, cream together butter, shortening and sugar.
• Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one.
• Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.
• Add dry ingredients in three additions to butter mixture alternately with half of the milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture.
• Beat at low speed just until blended after each addition.
• Gently stir in lemon juice and zest.
• Pour batter into prepared pan.
• Bake cake in 350° oven until cake is golden on top and tester inserted into center comes out clean, 55 - 70 minutes. (Start checking at the 55 minute mark.)
• Be careful not to open the oven if you don't think it's finished baking. (Opening the oven prematurely could cause the cake to fall.)
• Cool cake in pan.
• Using a sharp knife, gently separate cake from cake pan edges wherever you can, including around the center tube.
• Turn cake out onto rack.
• Serve with a dollop of fresh whipped cream or a spoonful of lemon curd.

The post Ritz Carlton Lemon Pound Cake Recipe appeared first on Through Her Looking Glass.

A generous slice of this Glazed Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake is especially scrumptious accompanied by a tall glass of fresh squeezed lemonade with a sprig of mint. Tender, buttery, dense lemon pound cake is studded with fresh, juicy blueberries for the perfect summer combo.

This recipe uses lemon extract in the cake and lemon juice in the glaze, for a great lemon pop. I’ve posted several lemon recipes back to back this spring because I love lemon in the springtime and summer so much. Lemons on the brain.

For me, baking with fresh lemons signals sunshine and warmth. And the daffodils in my front yard are just about to pop! When spring finally arrives here in New Hampshire and the bright green shoots are poking up, it’s time to bake something special to celebrate.

It was a long winter here and I didn’t do much baking. It wasn’t just the snowy weather (read: blizzards) that hit us hard in March.

There was also a lot of sickness in the house (flu, mono, colds, you name it) and big changes in routine and therapies for Hudson, our littlest guy with DS and autism. (Transitions are tough on him.) And then there was that kitchen reno that kept us busy in February and March! Six weeks without an oven will slow down any cake baking production for sure! LOL.

So I’m extra thankful to be through that rough patch of the year with sickness and construction. Today I’m celebrating our new kitchen and spring’s arrival by baking this buttery pound cake that pops with delicious lemon flavor and blueberries.

I prefer using fresh blueberries in this cake, but frozen will do in a pinch. Flouring the berries and folding them in very gently keeps the cake batter from turning blue. If you do use frozen, I suggest thawing and draining the berries first before flouring them.

So why flour the blueberries anyway? Well, it’s just a little culinary genius I think. (Not mine mind you.) Some baking guru along the way discovered that if you flour berries before adding them to a recipe, it keeps them evenly distributed in the batter during baking and prevents them from sinking to the bottom.

I’m not sure all the science behind it, seeing as I’m not exactly a scientist. (I never even memorized the periodic table in high school. Oops.) But flouring the berries does seem to help. So don’t forget! 

Another interesting fact about this Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake recipe is that it doesn’t use lemon juice for that wonderful lemon flavor pop. We’re using lemon extract instead. Not lemon oil. Lemon oil has a stronger, intense flavor that would be overwhelming in this pound cake.

And lemon juice is acidic and it would take a ton of lemon juice to flavor this cake adequately. The acidity of the lemon juice could also affect the rise.

So lemon extract it is, and you can find pure lemon extract in the baking aisle with other baking extracts like vanilla. And save the fresh squeezed lemon juice for the simple glaze.

I must tell you, the fabulous aroma of this cake baking in my kitchen right now is over the top incredible. I’m just about to pull it out of the oven now. It’s golden brown and smells of buttery lemon cake. I’m already thinking about who to share this cake with, because it’s pretty obvious I absolutely should not be left alone with it. Accountability is always good, especially when it comes to pound cake.

This is the two piece 10″ tube cake pan I used to bake this cake. Happy baking!

Tips on making this Glazed Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake:

• Grease and flour your tube cake pan.
• A two piece, 10″ tube pan works well for this cake.
• Wash and drain the berries first, then flour them with 1/4 cup of the flour.
• Be sure to hand mix in the flour mixture to the wet ingredients. This keeps the batter from getting over-mixed, which produces a tough cake.
• Also be sure to very gently mix in the floured blueberries at the end. This keeps the berries from breaking open and turning your cake batter blue with blueberry juice. (Maybe you want a blue cake, and if so disregard what I just said.) But I prefer a light lemon colored cake studded with blueberries – for contrast.
• If you want to bake this in your convection oven, just drop the temperature down to 300°.  You might have to cook it a little longer though. (I did.)
• The glaze is super easy to make – just whisk together the lemon juice and powdered sugar and drizzle over the cooled cake.

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Lemon Glazed Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 1 hour hour 15 minutes minutes

Total Time 1 hour hour 30 minutes minutes

Ingredients

Cake:

• 1 pint fresh blueberries washed and drained
• 3 cups all purpose flour divided
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature
• 2 cups white granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs at room temperature
• 2 tablespoons lemon extract
• optional: 1 tablespoon sparkling white sugar or turbinado sugar

Glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice

Instructions

Cake:

• Preheat oven to 325°.
• Toss washed, drained blueberries with 1/4 cup of flour and set aside.
• In a small mixing bowl, sift remaining 2 3/4 cups flour with baking powder and salt and set aside.
• Separately in large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar together with an electric hand or stand mixer.
• Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
• Add lemon extract and beat until fluffy.
• Fold flour mixture (by hand) into batter until well blended.
• Gently stir in blueberries, being careful not to smash berries.
• The batter will be very thick.
• Spoon batter into greased and floured 10" tube cake pan.
• Optional: Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sparkling white or turbinado sugar.
• Bake one hour and 15 minutes at 325° or longer, until cake is golden brown and tests done with a cake tester or toothpick.
• Cool cake in tube pan for 10 minutes.
• Use a sharp knife to carefully separate cake from the edges of the pan and around the tube in the middle.
• (If it's a 2-piece tube pan you're using - also use the knife to separate the cake from the bottom of the pan.)
• Carefully remove the cake from pan and cool on a baking rack.

Glaze:

• In a small mixing bowl, whisk together powdered sugar and lemon juice. Add more lemon juice if you want a thinner glaze.
• Drizzle glaze over cooled cake with a small spoon.

Notes

If using frozen blueberries, thaw and drain first.

You may also like: Lemon Curd Easy Thumbprint Cookies

The post Glazed Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake appeared first on Through Her Looking Glass.