Lemon Walnut Sour Cream (Yogurt) Pound Cake

This week’s Sweet Melissa Sundays treat is Lemon Walnut Sour Cream Pound Cake. Since quick breads tend to be both quick to put together and disappear (in this house), I am always happy to try a new one. I’d been craving citrus lately, too, and it’s always more fun to satisfy cravings with baked goods rather than just plain fruit – I have been eating plenty of clementines, though. The recipe said that the baking time could be up to an hour and a half; I was planning to have this for breakfast on Saturday, and I figured that if I wanted that to happen, it would be best to make it on Friday night. The cake was a breeze to put together and I thought the batter looked particularly nice; it was a very silky pale yellow. The recipe called for two ingredients I didn’t have on hand: shortening and sour cream, so I substituted nonfat plain yogurt for both. The cake was probably not quite as rich as it would have been with the shortening and sour cream, but it was still very moist and had a nice sturdy crumb, so I think the substitutions worked fine.



Overall, I liked this cake a lot. I appreciated the addition of walnuts, they made the cake seem a bit more substantial and breakfast-like. Nuts, yogurt, and fruit – definitely breakfast! I would have appreciated a bit more lemon flavor. You could taste it, but it wasn’t quite as intense as I like. A while back the group made Melissa’s Orange Poppyseed Cake, which called for pulverizing an entire orange in the food processor, and that probably would have added the extra tang I desired. I think Josh liked it a little better than me, since he gave it an 8.5 to my 7.5 for Deliciousness. It’s my blog, so I’m going to go with 7.5 and a 2 for Effort, giving the cake an EDR of 3.75. Many thanks to Raeann of Basically, Baby Boots for a perfect mid-January recipe. You can find the recipe here on Raeann’s site and visit the SMS blogroll to see what the rest of the group thought of this treat.