Lemon Cream Cheese Pound Cake
We love lemon cakes, and this Lemon Cream Cheese Pound Cake has the most wonderful texture and flavor! If you love pound cakes, save this recipe!
Table of Contents
Why we Love It
- Pound cake recipes are so simple and delicious!
- The cream cheese in the pound cake adds richness and enhances the texture (much like the ricotta cheese in our Lemon Ricotta Cake).
- Everyone loves lemon!
- Perfect for when you're searching for birthday cake recipes, summer cakes, or just a delicious dessert for family and friends.
How to Make Lemon Cream Cheese Pound Cake
This delicious recipe is based on our Cream Cheese Pound Cake, and aside from the cream cheese, it is also similar to our Buttermilk Pound Cake recipe and others.
You can find the full, printable recipe card at the bottom of this post. Here is a quick look at our steps!
- Grease and flour a bundt cake pan or tube pan. Preheat the oven to 325℉
- In a separate bowl, whisk the cake flour, baking powder, and salt to combine, set aside for later.
- Using an electric mixer (paddle attachment if using a stand mixer), mix the softened unsalted butter and softened cream cheese on medium speed until smooth.
- Next, gradually add the sugar and mix on medium speed until light and fluffy for three minutes.
- Add the eggs to the mixing bowl one at a time, blending after each until the yolk is incorporated.
- In a bowl or measuring cup, combine the ¼ cup of milk, ¼ cup lemon juice, lemon extract and zest. Set aside.
- With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the milk mixture to the butter/sugar/egg mixture in the mixing bowl. Begin and end with the dry ingredients. We do three additions of dry ingredients, alternating with two additions of wet. Mix just until combined.
- Scoop the batter into prepared bundt pan.
- Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour and 5-10 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. *Baking times may vary.
- This makes approximately 9.5 cups of batter.
- Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before turning out.
For the Glaze
Decorate the pound cake however you like! We often use a simple glaze, which is a mixture of confectioner's sugar, a bit of milk, flavoring, and a pinch of salt. Today, our flavoring was lemon extract to give a little added boost of lemon flavor.
If using a piped design as we did today, you'll need a thicker glaze, so use just a very small amount of milk and add bit by bit to reach desired consistency. If you plan to apply the glaze as a drip (as we did in our Sour Cream Pound Cake for example, it will need to be a touch thinner.)
*For our design, I spooned the glaze into a piping bag fitted with a tip 3 and piped on the flowers, leaves, and dots. It needs to be thick enough that it won't run down the side! ;0)
You could also use a very scaled down version of buttercream, or simply top with a dusting of powdered sugar (tapped through a fine sifter), or you can skip the decoration and serve with berries and whipped cream or a scoop of ice cream!
Recipe FAQs
More Pound Cakes
We have so many more pound cakes and bundt cake recipes to share with you!
A few of our favorites are: Coconut Pound Cake, Chocolate Chip Pound Cake, Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake, and Strawberry Pound Cake!
Have you made this? We would LOVE for you to leave a ⭐️ rating as well as a comment and photo below! We really appreciate your feedback!
Lemon Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Ingredients
- 2 sticks unsalted butter softened (equivalent of 226g or 1 cup butter)
- 8 oz block cream cheese, softened. We used one package (8 oz.). Full fat cream cheese.
- 3 cups (600g) sugar
- 5 large eggs room temperature place in a bowl of warm water for 5 minutes to speed up the process.
- 3 cups (342 g) cake flour (Not self rising. We use Swan's Down, bleached)
- ½ teaspoon (2g) baking powder
- ½ teaspoon (3g) salt
- ¼ cup (60g) milk (we recommend whole milk or 2 percent).
- 1 tablespoon (12g) Lemon Extract
- ¼ cup Lemon Juice plus zest (The approximate amount of one lemon.) If you have less than ¼ lemon juice, make up the difference with milk.
Glaze
- 1 cup confectioners sugar
- 1 ½ teaspoons milk Add additional bit by bit until you reach desired consistency.
- pinch of salt
- ½ tsp lemon extract, optional Adjust amount to your liking.
Instructions
- Grease and flour a bundt cake pan or tube pan.
- Preheat the oven to 325℉
- In a separate bowl, whisk the cake flour, baking powder, and salt to combine, set aside for later.
- Using an electric mixer (paddle attachment if using a stand mixer), mix the butter and cream cheese on medium speed until smooth.
- Next, gradually add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy for three minutes.
- Add the eggs to the mixing bowl one at a time, blending after each until the yolk is incorporated.
- Combine the ¼ cup of milk, ¼ cup lemon juice, lemon extract, and zest.
- With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the milk to the butter/sugar/egg mixture in the mixing bowl. Begin and end with the dry ingredients. We do three additions of dry ingredients, alternating with two additions of wet. Mix just until incorporated.
- Scoop batter into prepared bundt pan.
- Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour and 5-10 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. *Baking times may vary.
- This makes approximately 9.5 cups of batter.
- Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before turning out.
Glaze
- Combine ingredients, adding the milk bit by bit until you reach desired consistency for dripping or piping. If piping, it will need to be thick.
Decorating the Cake
- Once the cake has cooled, you can apply the glaze however you like, whether piping a drizzle or a design. If doing a piped design, the glaze will need to be pretty thick so that it will not run.
Looks delish! Love the piping on it :-)
Thanks Teri!!
my granddaughter's love lemon 🍋 cake I cannot wait to make this with them.
Nana Wright
Great! So happy to hear it. I hope you all enjoy it!
Absolutely beautiful!
I love anything 🍋. I will be making this cake this coming weekend. This is indeed a celebration of Summer🦋
Thanks Val! Hope you enjoy it!
Can’t wait to try this lemon cake. Lemon cake is my hubbies favorite.
Great!! Hope you all enjoy the recipe!
Looking so forward to baking your lemon pound, the sound of it already has me tasting it 😋 with my family! Will let you know & thank you 👍
Great, I'm so glad that you're excited to try it!
will adding the lemon juice to the milk cause it to cuddle?
Hi Liz, yes, the lemon juice+milk will change the consistency of the milk (similar to buttermilk).
Saw this recipe and knew immediately I had to try it. Lemon? Cream Cheese? Oh yeah…I’m in there like swimwear! Looks and sounds amazing!
So the cake is in the oven as I type this…and I’m so bummed I didn’t pay close enough attention to the size Bundt pan I needed. It’s starting to overflow and I’m concerned it’s not going to bake properly.
I used a standard, run of the mill Bundt pan….it’s way too small. So sad. I know you mentioned how much batter this makes, but I just didn’t correlate that with my pan.
I’ll let you know how it comes out…fingers crossed!
Hi Linda! Oh no- sorry to hear that it is overflowing! I hope that you were able to salvage it. Let us know how it goes!
Just didn’t turn out how it was intended. I don’t think it’s the recipe….I’m sure I did something wrong (sigh). But I’ll definitely give it another try soon. I will say though that my husband loved the crunchy bits from the overflow LOL!
what size Bundt pan did you use and what size should I use?
This is a great recipe,my family love it.
Hi Elizabeth! I'm so glad to hear it, thank you for the review!
what size Bundt pan?
Hi Taronta- Ours are 15 cup pans with a baking capacity of 12 cups. This recipe makes about 9.5 cups of batter.
If your pans are smaller, a general rule of thumb is to fill the pan no more than about 3/4 full (or leave no less than about 1.25 inches from top of batter to top edge of pan.)
thank you, this will be my first pound cake from scratch and I'm nervous... any tips will help thanks in advance
I don't have any additional tips but you won't have any trouble! Hope you all love it.
Followed recipe exactly, does take more than 10 minutes to prep. I used a Bundt pan, sprayed thoroughly, cake baked 1 hour 10 minutes, very golden on the sides. When dumping out of pan, sides stuck to pan. I patched the cake, but still a mess. Taste is still delicious, very moist. Not sure what happened, but will make again.
Hi Darlene- I'm sorry, I know that is frustrating. We prefer to grease our bundt pans with vegetable shortening and then flour the pan. We turn it out after 10 minutes. Not sure if the time it sat in the pan would have played a role, or if some spots were missed with the baking spray/flour- but it wouldn't be the recipe itself that caused it to stick. Glad that you enjoyed it anyway! ;0)
I have tried this recipe twice now and found that it is not done in 70 minutes. It was still not quite done at 90 minutes despite a clean skewer last attempt . My oven temperature is correct. Any ideas why this happened? Flavor is amazing & I would love to master this one.
Hi Mary! Bake times can vary as there are so many variables (size and type of bundt pan, position in the oven, and more). In your case, I would try bumping up the temperature to 350 next time. It's not unusual for a cake to need a bit more time, but I agree that 90 minutes is long for it not to be done.
Over-mixing can cause sort of gummy streaks in the cake that do have an undercooked look to them. It may be true that your cake just needed more time to bake but I wanted to mention the over-mixing possibility just in case. (When alternating between dry and wet ingredients, we mix on low just until incorporated.)
I have made this several times and everybody loves it I am a lemon lover so I really love it
Thank you Pearl, so glad to hear it!
I am looking for your recipe of a lemon cake with lemon curd....................
can't seem to find it...................
i make your limoncello bunt cake...........it is delicious, and everyone loves it.........I always have one in my freezer.................
I love your recipes...........................
Hi Mary! So glad that you are enjoying the recipes- I think the one that you are looking for is our Lemon Cake from Scratch (we've made a few other scratch versions but this was the first) --
https://www.mycakeschool.com/lemon-scratch-recipe/