Ina Garten

I've wanted to make a lemon poppy seed pound cake for years, and this recipe did not disappoint. I had it with my family on the fourth of July, and it was a resounding success. The cake is moist and tender. The bright lemon-y flavor offsets the dense nature of pound cake perfectly. The recipe uses a LOT of lemon, but the finished product is beautifully balanced.

To address the elephant in the room -- yes, the cake did break, as the picture shows. I ended up liking the rustic look of the cracked loaf, but obviously this is something to be avoided in the future. I couldn't find my mom's baking spray so used butter instead to grease the pan. I also was in a hurry to get the cake out of the pan after it came out of the oven, and attempted to flip it out when it was still piping hot. I also was using a loaf pan, which was too small and the wrong shape for this cake. So, that's all to say, there were many factors contributing to the cake breaking. Oh well.

This cake was meant to be made in a bundt pan, not a loaf pan, and in the future I will use a bundt pan. Besides the fact that a loaf pan is too small for the cake, the bundt pan would allow for shorter, more even baking. A bundt shape would foster more evenly distributed lemon syrup and glaze.

My last note on this cake is that it's quite heavy. It's the type of dessert that will make you want to lie down after eating. This is partly because pound cakes pack in a lot of butter and sugar. It's also because lemon desserts typically have a lot of sugar to offset the acidity. Personally, I'm a big dessert fan, so I'm game to have the cake with all its bells and whistles. But if you wanted to make this cake a bit more "snack-able", you could skip the lemon syrup infusion. The syrup contributes a lot of great lemon flavor, so the cake would be less overt-ly lemon flavored without it. That said, this modification might make the cake more appealing to folks who are sensitive to sugar.