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.
Found this easy, quick recipe after making an angel food cake, using 1 dozen fresh eggs from my parents’ chickens. I measured the egg yolks and didn’t have a full cup, so I added a whole egg and beat it with the yolks using the KitchenAid mixer. Perhaps I should have beat them longer, because it didn’t look like I thought it would, but I thought the additional whole egg could have changed how it turned out. I used almond flavoring, one of my favorites, and in combination with the lemon the result was one of the best cakes ever, according to my family! I baked it in a tube pan, the batter was beautiful, and it baked for exactly 1 hour.
Does this cake freeze well?
Hi, I don’t have a tube pan or bundt pan. I do have round 6*3 and 8*3 and a square 8*8*3 pans. I am also planning to half the recipe. which pan should I bake it in? and time and temperature will remain same or will they differ?
The 8×8-inch will probably be best, refer to this post. I think it’ll help you. https://www.callmepmc.com/can-i-bake-a-pound-cake-in-a-9×13-inch-pan/
I made this recipe twice. The first time I beat the egg yokes until I thought they were fluffy, resulting in a heavy but tasty pound cake. The second time I beat them with my Kitchen Aid mixer on 10 for a long time until they started to resemble stiff beaten egg whites. This cake is marvelous! It is very light and looks just like the picture! What a wonderful recipe!
It may be my mistake, but I feel like something was “off” on the recipe. It looked like a huge lava flow all over my oven; even though with I smelled something burning put foil under the pan. Although it was delicious! I was surprised that there was no butter or oil and quite a bit of baking powder. It took longer to bake than specified, maybe an hour 15 minutes. If I try it again, I will likely cut back a little on the water or use two pans, the batter came to the top of the pan before I put it in the oven. OR maybe I beat the yolks too much?
I’ve made it 100s of times by this recipe. I feel like your bundt pan is too small.
My bundt pan is also too small, I filled it about 2/3rd full and stopped pouring. I’m going to resize the recipe, but it was so good, I will make it again.
Or use the extra batter for cupcakes
Can I freeze the pound cake ?
Yes, wrap airtight. Pound cakes freeze beautifully.
My teenage daughter performed an unrelated baking experiment using egg whites. She asked me if I should save the yolks. I said yes, and stumbled across this recipe.
Since I only had six egg yolks, I cut the recipe in half. In an effort to reduce the carb/sugar content, I used coconut flour (1/3 cup) and Lakanto baking monkfruit sweetener (1 cup.) To my chagrin, I realized I didn’t have lemon or almond extract. So I used the banana extract that I had instead to go along with the Mexican vanilla extract I had.
I had enough batter for two ramekins. I baked them for 45 minutes, but I think it could’ve baked 5 – 10 minutes less. The end result was better than I expected! Moist & flavorful.
Love your substitutions.
Excellent recipe! One of the best pound cakes I have ever made. The crumb was moist and soft. Easy to cut and serve. I used orange extract instead of lemon and the cake had a wonderful flavor. This is a recipe I will use again. Thank you.