Recipe: Lemon-Almond Pound Cake

Cookbook

Lemon-Almond Pound Cake

Serves 10

This is our hands-down favorite cake of the moment. It's versatile, absolutely delicious by itself with tea or coffee or with ice cream, sorbets, granitas, berries or other summer fruit. Manhattan chef Matttew Kenney invented it, and food editor Jane Ellis, bless her heart, published it in House Beautiful Entertaining.

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup olive oil
3/4 cup sugar
12 ounces almond paste, cut into pieces
Grated zest of 3 lemons
5 large eggs
1/2 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
1 teaspoon baking powder
3-4 tablespoons lemon liqueur (see Cook's Note)
Confectioners' sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. And set a rack on the middle level. Butter a 9-inch round cake pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper, butter the paper and dust with flour.

Beat together the 5 tablespoons butter, oil and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add the almond paste and lemon zest and beat until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Fold in the flour and baking powder.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 1 hour, until a cake tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out almost clean. Let cool in the pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Unmold onto the rack and let cool completely.

Transfer the cake right side up to a serving plate and gradually brush the lemon liqueur over the top slowly so it sinks in completely. (The cake can be made up to a day in advance; wrap with plastic wrap and store at room temperature.) Just before serving, sprinkle the cake with confectioners' sugar.

Cook's Note:

For the lemon liqueur, use limoncello imported from Italy or your own house brand.

Buy the Book!

The Best American Recipes 1999
The Year's Top Picks from Books,
Magazines, Newspapers and the Internet
Series Editors: Fran McCullough and Suzanne Hamlin
Houghton Mifflin Company, October 1999
Hardcover, $26.00, 228 pages
8 full-color photographs
ISBN: 0-395-96647-7
Recipe Reprinted by permission.