A Dessert Solution with Limited Ingredients: Lemon Pudding Cake

Lately, I’ve been plagued with a sweet tooth and my only solution of late is to go out and buy something. There’s always the occasional cookies from Sprouts (Paul loves them), frozen yogurt from Yogurtland is always an option (except the one near is always a mess) and more importantly, I always make sure to have ice cream in the freezer. But lately, I haven’t made anything from scratch in months. You’d think that working from home with give me loads of time to bake but I don’t have it. Then the baking bug hit me this Sunday.

I’ve been craving lemon desserts and wanted to do something with the Meyer lemons from our patio tree. Some research led me to lemon pudding cake described as a lemon angel food cake with a lemon sauce on the bottom. And it only required lemons, eggs, flour, sugar, milk and very little butter.

On the fly, I reduced the sugar and if I had some foresight, I would have also shifted some confectioner’s sugar on top. But the cake is a dream. Baking it in a hot water bath creates a luscious lemon sauce on the bottom but light-as-air cake on top. It’s pretty freaking amazing that one batter creates a sauce and bakes a cake on top.

Lemon Pudding Cake

½ cup flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature
4 large eggs, separated and at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup lemon juice
Zest of one lemon
1½ cups milk

Heat oven 350 degrees F.

In small bowl, combine flour and salt.

In a large bowl, beat together butter, egg yolks and sugar. Beat in lemon juice and zest until well combined. Mix half of flour-salt into eggs alternately with half the milk until everything is thoroughly combined.

In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until stiff. Fold egg whites into batter and pour into 8-inch baking dish.

Place baking dish in pan of hot water and move into the oven. Bake for 40-45 minutes (rotating half way) until top of cake is browned.