Twelve Yolk Cake
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A great use of leftover egg yolks, Twelve Yolk Cake, is golden and tender. This is a delicious basic cake recipe that’s not overly sweet. Serve this with a good vanilla ice cream and rich caramel sauce.
Versatile and delicious, you’ll want to pin this 12 Yolk Cake to save it.
Twelve Yolk Cake
When a reader asked me if I had a Twelve Yolk Cake recipe, I became intrigued. She sad the twelve yolks made a pound cake and the twelve egg whites, in turn, are used for an Angel Food Cake.
Well, I had never heard of this but got busy searching through old cookbooks to see what I could find. The recipe below is an adapted version of a twelve-yolk cake that I found. As well, be sure to make my Angel Food Cake.
This is not what I truly call a ‘pound cake’ because it is more airy and fluffy than a traditional dense, small crumb, pound cake. In fact, I would classify this as a ‘sponge cake’ in texture.
However, Twelve Yolk Pound Cake is soft, rich with a buttery-like texture from all the yolks. Furthermore, because of the number of golden egg yolks, this cake has a lovely golden color.
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Make all my pound cakes, get the recipes> Pound Cake Reviews Series.
12 Yolk Cake Tips
- Coincidently, you can use your favorite flavoring in this cake. Good basic flavorings to try are vanilla, lemon, coconut, or almond.
- This cake is mixed together differently than most pound cakes. Therefore, you may want to read through the directions entirely before beginning the recipe.
- Twelve yolks make about one liquid cup measure. If you have medium or small eggs, you may want to measure them in a cup to assure you have the correct amount.
- You’ll want all the ingredients to be at room temperature. (Except for the water in this recipe.)
- Also, you’ll need to sift the flour before measuring. For baking, it’s very important to correctly measure all the ingredients. Flour is easily measured incorrectly. Please read this post on How to correctly Measure Flour.
- Serve this with ice cream and caramel sauce, chocolate sauce, or blueberry sauce.
Tools for Baking
- A larger bundt
- Or this tube pan
- Favorite spatulas
- For all my baking essentials, visit my Amazon Store.
Twelve Yolk Cake
Ingredients
- 12 large egg yolks room temp
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 and ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon lemon extract or vanilla or almond
- 1 cup cold water or milk
Instructions
- Prepare a 10-inch (12-cup) tube pan or 12-cup bundt pan with non-stick spray.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. (I recommend you Calibrate your oven!)
- Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together.
- In a mixing bowl, beat egg yolks until very fluffy and thick.
- Gradually beat in sugar and beat 2 minutes on high speed, stopping to scrape the bowl.
- Reduce speed to low and add vanilla, lemon, and cold water.
- Gradually, but quickly add sifted flour mixture while beating on low, scrape bowl.
- Beat only long enough to blend, about 2 minutes.
- Pour batter into prepared pan.
- Bake 50 to 60 minutes or until lightly golden or until a pick inserted in thickest portion of the cake comes out clean or with dry crumbs. (Watch closely if you haven't calibrated your oven. Baking pans can affect baking times as well. If it turns out dry you cooked it too long.)
- Cool cake for 15 minutes on wire rack before removing from the pan. Loosen sides of cake from pan with a spatula, then remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack.
- Store in an airtight container 4 days or on countertop or 1 week in the refrigerator.
Nutrition
Nutritional information given is an automatic calculation and can vary based on the exact products you use and changes you make to the recipe. If these numbers are important to you, I recommend calculating them yourself.
I made this cake yesterday and finished it this afternoon by cutting it into 3 layers and putting whipped fresh cream, vanilla and a little bit of icing sugar. I put strawberries and violas on the top to decorate it. When the 4 grandchildren and my daughter-in-law came to visit for afternoon tea, more than half the cake was gobbled up! They all loved it and so did my husband and I. It is rich but not sickly. Definitely will make this again!
Can you substitute the sugar with sweetener such as Splenda or monk fruit or Erythritol etc.
I haven’t tested with those sweeteners. Usually if they are a 1 to 1 sub for granulated sugar they work from reader comments. But I haven’t tested it.
Can you substitute the sugar with monk fruit, sugar, or another sweetener as I do not use white sugar?
I am going to call this a Ladyfinger cake as I feel the texture and taste was very much like ladyfingers. Agree with other comments and with author’s warning that this turns out to be quite a dry cake, though the taste is good. If I made it again, I would slice it in half, fill the middle with a whipped cream filling or one of the sauces suggested, and then top it with a frosting. This time around I topped it with a lime frosting and sliced fresh strawberries and served it with a generous dollop of strawberry whipped cream. My bake time was only 45 minutes. It was wonderful to find a recipe that used up so many egg yolks at one time as when you search, most recipes are using 3 yolks, not nearly enough when you bake all the time and use lots of whites!
So I am making an angel food cake and I had 12 expensive yolks left. I searched and came upon this recipe and followed it to the letter. It came out great! While it’s not a traditional butter pound cake, it rose beautifully and has great flavor and color. I paired it with a whipped cream and I think berries would be great! Thanks for the recipe!
Good flavor but my goodness it was dry! I did wonder about a cake with no fat being dry but thought the yolks would maybe provide enough fat. I had a bunch of duck eggs (which have bigger richer yolks than chicken eggs) to use up. I also don’t understand using water when milk can be used. Water brings no flavor to the party. I will try this again with milk & vegetable oil as I still have a lot of duck eggs.
If it was dry, you over-cooked it.
I agree I was curious about having no extra fat except from the eggs. I was going to try subbing the water for buttermilk.
It’s great as written as long as you don’t over cook it. It’s more of a sponge cake, very light.
Can I substitute vanilla for the lemon abstract? I thought you suggested other flavors but wanted to check.
Thank you
Yes, you can.
Added lemon zest & it was delicious. Agree with the other reviewers that it’s really a sponge cake. Baked it in a Bundt pan & dusted with confectioner’s sugar before serving-beautiful!