I've been baking a lot with lemon recently, but I haven't actually been posting very many lemon-containing recipes (or really, very many recipes at all). It's not that I haven't been testing at least one, if not several, new recipes every week. Unfortunately, I've fallen into the problematic routine of collecting photos and notes but not actually typing them up and posting the results. One of the great things about following the scheduled recipes on Baked Sunday Mornings is it enforces some concrete post deadlines. Today's scheduled recipe was the Lemon Lemon Loaf from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, and since I have loved all the lemon things I've tried from the Baked collection of cookbooks, I was pretty convinced I would love this little loaf as well.
I was planning to make these lemon lemon loaves for a group event, which would have been perfect, but tragically I found myself completely out of butter the night before. Having to wait a few days until I procured some butter, I opted to halve the recipe. While the header says this cake freezes well, I don't have room in my freezer to test that theory and we didn't need two full butter cakes at home.
You need to plan ahead long enough to bring your eggs and sour cream up to room temperature, and you'll want to melt the butter a little ahead of time so it has the opportunity to cool, but otherwise this is a really simple recipe. I've never made a loaf cake in the food processor, but a simple google search indicates the America's Test Kitchen, Alice Medrich, and a whole host of other people swear by the approach. It's fast, it limits the number of bowls you need to use (by one or two anyhow), and in theory, it guarantees a moist, fine crumb rather than an overmixed, dry, rubbery pound cake.
You'll start by pulsing together the eggs, sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice together in your food processor. I doubled the amount of lemon zest I used here, and I rubbed it into the granulated sugar about 10-20 minutes before starting to mix everything together (you could do this when you set the ingredients out to warm them to room temperature. 
After the egg-sugar-lemon mixture looks cohesive, you'll turn your food processor on at its lowest speed setting and drizzle in the melted butter. Turn the mixer off, scrape in the sour cream, add the vanilla extract, then pulse to just combine. Pour the wet mix into a large bowl. In a separate bowl, you'll stir together all the dry ingredients, then sift ⅓ of the dry mix over the wet mix, gently fold to combine, then repeat twice more until the batter is just cohesive. It's pretty rare for the Baked cookbooks to call for sifting, so when you see it, you should really pay attention and actually take the time to sift. Please take my cautionary word for it, because I ignored the directive this time and wound up with small chunks of dry ingredients in my finished cake, which wouldn't have happened if I'd sifted like I was supposed to.
I greased my 9x5-inch loaf pan really well, added a parchment liner and greased that as well, then baked for the maximum recommended time (55 minutes total: 20 at 350, then 35 at 325). I thought my single loaf might take less time, but either that's incorrect, or my oven is just off (I think it's the latter, but I did just buy an oven thermometer and it says my oven is really at the temperature it believes itself to be, so who knows).
Since I was making this loaf to share with Caleb and my parents, and none of them are big icing people, I skipped the lemon syrup as well as the lemon icing drizzle and just served the naked loaf. The addition of a little sour cream makes for a really rich and creamy texture, yielding a fine crumb and tender buttery cake (aside from the few specks of "you should have sifted me!" dry ingredients). Unfortunately, the simple syrup and icing pack a big lemon flavor hit and Caleb felt the loaf itself was not particularly lemon-y.
For the recipe and to see how the other bakers fared, head on over to Baked Sunday Mornings.
Below is the halved version of the recipe, with the weights that I used. You'll need to visit BSM for the method, or just read my notes in the post above, since part of the covenant is that we participants don't published the actual recipe.
Ingredients
- 195 grams all-purpose flour
- 15 grams corn starch or arrowroot starch
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ⅛ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 225 grams (1 ⅛ cup) granulated sugar
- 4 large eggs at room temperature
- ¼ cup freshly grated lemon zest from 4 lemons
- 2 tablespoons (⅛ cup) fresh squeezed lemon juice
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter melted and cooled (but not resolidifed)
- 60 grams (¼ cup) sour cream (not light or non-fat) at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
