Lemon Loaf Cake

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Lemon Loaf Cake. Our hosts this week are Truc of Treats and Michelle of The Beauty of Life, and you can get the complete recipe for the loaf cake on their blogs. It seems like I have made many cakes that are similar to this one. We did make a similar cake, but with yogurt, when TWD was baking through Baking From My Home to Yours. But I guess I just like lemon pound cakes and therefore this one seemed familiar.

This is an easy cake to put together; you just have to make sure that you have lemons and some heavy cream. I imagine you could substitute something for the heavy cream, milk or sour cream or yogurt, but I did happen to have heavy cream on hand. I made mine in the mixer, but I probably could have mixed it by hand. I did make sure not to mix it too much, as the way the recipe was written I got the feeling that an over mixed cake would be very bad.

The cake baked fine but it looked a little plain, so I tried to think of a way to jazz it up. We’ve finally had some nice weather in the Seattle area and so I was thinking spring, so strawberry shortcake was the first thing that came to mind. Our weather has been so bad that strawberries are not yet in abundance, but I found some decent ones at the store. This lemon cake is lovely, with a perfect sweet/tart/lemon flavor and it was excellent as the base for strawberry shortcake.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, pages 252-253