If you love vegan cake recipes like vegan lemon yogurt bundt cake and vegan lemon cake with lemon curd topping, this is the dessert for you. This vegan lemon pound cake is one of my all-time favorite desserts, and I’ll tell you why. It has a dense, perfectly tender and velvety crumb – exactly as a pound cake should. Add to that the bright, lemony flavor in each bite compounded astronomically by the lemon glaze. What’s not to love?
What is a pound cake?
Pound cakes were so named because they were originally made with a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs and a pound of flour. There was no leavening and the name itself was the recipe. But over time, as cooks and times changed, pound cakes began to incorporate more ingredients, like sour cream, milk, and even leavening like baking soda and baking powder. A vegan pound cake would require you do away with two key ingredients: butter and eggs. But that is a problem that’s easily solved with all we know about vegan baking today. Butter is easy enough to sub–I’ve used olive oil in the past just for a different flavor, but my advise is to just go with vegan butter for the best flavor. And you don’t need a pound of it. You just need a quarter of a pound, or one stick of butter. The eggs don’t get a single substitute. Instead, I use a bit of cornstarch in the recipe, which helps with binding and also makes the cake crumb lighter. And I add some baking soda and baking powder for a bit of lift and structure, although you don’t want too much of it, because you want that dense, soft crumb.
Why you will love this vegan pound cake
Buttery and authentic flavor. You can’t have a pound cake without the buttery flavor and in this vegan pound cake the vegan butter and cultured vegan yogurt add lots of buttery flavor while keeping the cake dairy-free. Soft, silky, dense crumb. A defining characteristic of the perfect pound cake is its soft, dense crumb, and this vegan pound cake does not disappoint. The cake has a tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture anyone will fall in love with! Easy recipe. This is a pretty straightforward recipe and if you follow it carefully, you will succeed. I’ve tried making this in one bowl and while you can do that, I prefer the texture that results from the process of mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately before combining them. Soy-free, nut-free recipe. It’s also eggless and dairy-free, of course.
How to make vegan lemon pound cake
Expert tips
Baking a pound cake is different from baking a regular cake in a few crucial ways. You need to switch up your technique a bit when you make it. When you make other cakes, you want the crumb to be airy and fluffy, so you start out by creaming the vegan butter and sugar together and incorporate air into your batter. With a pound cake, which is soft but has a dense crumb, you want to reverse the technique–you want to mix the flour and other dry ingredients and then add the liquid ingredients to it without incorporating too much air into them first. Traditional pound cakes do not use leavening agents, but we will use baking soda and baking powder in the vegan pound cake recipe because they will help give the cake a bit of a rise, which the egg would, and make it lighter. With the butter, I tried two different techniques and both produced different results, so I wanted to share those in case you’d like to try either. The way you incorporate butter into this recipe, a technique I learned from this awesome video, to get the right pound cake texture, is to add it to the flour so the butter coats it. This does produce a more dense crumb, but be sure that your butter is completely soft if you do so. Otherwise the butter might not incorporate thoroughly. When I tried making the cake again, I melted the butter and then added it. I preferred this technique because it produced a slightly lighter crumb. You can try either. Some of the lemon flavor dissipates from the pound cake during baking so while a fourth of a cup of lemon juice might seem like a lot, it isn’t. The kind of pan you use will determine the color of your cake. A metal pan will produce a darker color on the outside, and a glass pan will give your cake a lighter look. Don’t worry if the pound cake cracks on top–it is meant to. 🙂
Storage instructions
Refrigerate: Store the cake in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week. Freeze: Freeze the pound cake, either whole or sliced, in a freezer-safe container for up to three months. You can also wrap individual slices in freezer wrap, then place them in a freezer-safe bag and store. Thaw the pound cake before eating.
More delicious vegan loaf cake recipes
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Fresh berries, including blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. Sliced peaches and vegan whipped cream. If you skip the glaze, you can top the lemon pound cake with vegan lemon curd. Sliced bananas, sweetened coconut flakes and a drizzle of maple syrup.
