When I made my first Angel Food Cake earlier this month, I had to use a dozen egg whites. That meant I had a dozen egg yolks left over, and I hated just pouring them down the drain. I googled “what can I make with a dozen egg yolks” on a whim and the first result was this Twelve Yolk Pound Cake recipe. It was perfect! I already had the egg yolks, and there were only a few other ingredients needed to bring this recipe to life. I had to make it!
Versatile and delicious, Twelve Yolk Pound Cake has it all. This cake is also a great way to use leftover egg yolks. A great basic cake that’s not overly sweet. Serve this with a good vanilla ice cream and rich caramel sauce.
The Ingredients
I think this is the perfect place to mention that this is not your traditional pound cake recipe—it’s much lighter. Pound cake is heavy and dense because it’s made with 1 pound each of four main ingredients: flour, butter, sugar, and eggs.
This recipe skips the butter and has less of the other three. I got curious to see what the weights would be for this recipe and looked them up. It gets close to one pound of flour and sugar, but the eggs are pretty much halved:
- 3 cups all-purpose flour = 0.8 pounds
- 12 large egg yolks = 0.49 pound
- 2 cups granulated sugar = 0.89 pounds
All tolled, this cake recipe has 8 ingredients. That’s not bad at all, especially since one of them is cold water, and I already had the egg yolks. If you’ve ever done any baking, I imagine you will have most of the rest in your pantry like I did.
I went through my pantry for the other ingredients, and I almost had them all. I was so close, but no lemon extract. A quick text to hubby, and I had a bottle in my hand that evening so I could bake the next day.
The Process
This recipe calls for a tube pan or a bundt pan, so I decided to use the angel food cake pan I just purchased. It’s not fancy, but it was the right size, and I didn’t want to order another pan that I would have to find room to store. I don’t have room!
This recipe’s instructions were as simple as the list of ingredients. I began with sifting together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Next, I added all those egg yolks to my stand mixer, put on the wire whisk, and beat them until they were nice and fluffy.
The recipe doesn’t specify what tool to use for this, but I can’t imagine it not being electric. I opted for my stand mixer, but a hand mixer would have worked too. An old-fashioned balloon whisk could do it if you really, really need a good arm workout!
Once that was done, I added the sugar, then the extracts and cold water. Finally, I mixed in the sifted flour and the batter was ready to pour into the pan.
I baked my Twelve Yolk Pound Cake for 50 minutes. The top had cracked nicely, and it passed the toothpick test, so no more baking was needed. Cooling took some patience (it always does!), but I found the cake was super easy to remove once it was done.
While the cake fully cooled, I had plenty of time to make raspberry sauce for it. I found the recipe on the same author’s website, and I had frozen raspberries waiting in the freezer. It only had 4 ingredients, and it took me 10 minutes to make. A little slower than the time listed, but I didn’t thaw the raspberries first.
Timing
This recipe lists 10 minutes to prep, 50 minutes to bake, and 1 hour total. Here’s how my time was spent:
- 17 minutes to prep
- 50 minutes to bake
- 2 minutes to remove from the pan
- 1 hour 9 minutes total
My prep took me longer than listed, but the baking time was spot-on. Also, neither includes 15 minutes to cool in the pan or time to cool completely on a wire rack.
