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.
You may also like these cakes
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 subbed lemon juice and zest because I didn’t have lemon extract. It was delicious and moist. Thank you!
Very happy to have found this recipe. I am in New Zealand and had 12 yolks left over from pavlovas so this recipe was perfect. Added bonus was it’s dairy free so I could give some to my mum. I thought about icing it with lemon icing but left it plain and it is delicious on it’s own.
Needs butter or oil , too dry. I even added a glaze still too dry.
If it was too dry you either over cooked it or added too much flour.
I’m surprised that there’s no butter in this recipe.
Hi Paula,
I’m so happy to have found this recipe, have lots of egg yolks left over from baking macaroons and meringue cookies.
I prefer weight measurements, especially for the flour.
How much is 1 cup of flour in grams?
I ask, as one of the replies provided instructions on substitute for cake flour, i.e. 1 cup of flour is 100gm. On the internet, it says 120 to 130 gm.
Am excited to try this recipe, could you confirm the grams of flour in this recipe please.
Thank you!
I had to search online as I don’t cook with grams and king arthur flour site has ‘A cup of all-purpose flour weighs 4 1/4 ounces or 120 grams.’
This is the first scratch cake I have made that didn’t sink in the middle and didn’t have the consistency of cornbread! It was delicious! My daughter and 2 yr old great grandson loved it too. Thank you!
This was a very good recipe. An old-fashioned tasting cake and easy to make. I was looking for a recipe to use up the yolks from my sponge cake. Thanks for sharing
I made this today. I made a couple of changes. I used 2 3/4 cups Bobs red mill 1 to 1 gluten free flour blend and 1/8 cup coconut flour in place of the 3 cups AP flour and 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup sour cream in place of the water. I baked it 50 minutes and it is moist and delicious.
My sister and I have been baking for years for family, friends, and even professionally. I bake specially wedding cakes. When we get together, we always end up making old favorites or trying something new. We have chickens so we have an abundance of eggs we made pumpkin
Bread using 12 eggs so we found this recipe to use the 12 yolks. It smelled and looked beautiful, but was really dry. I read the reviews and it said if the cake was dry it was over baked, of course I assumed that so we made another one. Checked it at 35 minutes and it was not done,left it in six more minutes. It was done came out of the pan good but was again dry and I was very disappointed.
Mine wasn’t dry when I test it multiple times. It was soft, moist, and tender.