I Tried the Famous Ritz-Carlton Lemon Pound Cake and I Already Want to Make It Again

Neiman Marcus has its cookies, The Waldorf has its namesake salad, and the Ritz-Carlton has this lemon pound cake. Or at least that’s how the legend goes.

According to the internet, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel used to serve a practically-famous lemon pound cake in its tea room in the 1920s. Now, TikTokers and foodies everywhere are trying to recreate the dessert—saying their recipes will save you the thousands of dollars it costs to stay at the notoriously pricy Ritz-Carlton.

The only problem? The Ritz-Carlton doesn’t serve this lemon pound cake now, and there’s no readily available evidence that it ever did. We tried reaching out to the Ritz-Carlton to get to the bottom of it but never heard back.

So, in reality, this might just be someone’s grandma’s old-fashioned pound cake recipe with the Ritz-Carlton name slapped on it to gain internet traction (which obviously worked). Or, it might actually be the recipe for a lemon pound cake that the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Coco Chanel enjoyed at the luxury hotel.

Whatever the origin story, I never pass up the chance to make a pound cake. And with the warm weather finally breaking, the idea of a zesty lemon pound cake was truly a springtime dream. So I set out to work.

How to Make the Ritz-Carlton Lemon Pound Cake

Ingredients: 

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup salted butter, softened at room temperature
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 3 cups white sugar
• 5 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1 cup whole milk
• 6 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice, freshly squeezed
• Zest from one lemon
• Confectioners’ sugar (optional)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 10-inch Bundt pan.
2. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Set aside.
3. Cream butter, shortening, and sugar in a separate bowl with an electric mixer until well combined. Add in eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Alternate adding flour mixture and whole milk until just combined. Mix in lemon juice and lemon zest. Pour batter into the prepared pan.
4. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 55 minutes. Let stand for about 10 minutes, then run a knife along the edges and invert the pan onto a cooling rack. Allow to cool completely.
5. Dust with confectioners’ sugar, if desired.

I Tried the Ritz-Carlton Lemon Pound Cake

The Ritz-Carlton pound cake is really just your traditional lemon pound cake recipe—it reminds me of our Old-Fashioned Lemon Pound Cake recipe, just made with fresh lemon juice instead of bottled extract. Like most old-fashioned recipes there’s one secret ingredient that makes it taste so good—and it’s one that you’ll find in a lot of your favorite recipes from your grandma: Crisco.

There’s nothing like good, old vegetable shortening to make a cake more rich and scrumptious.

The most important thing to remember about this recipe is the mixing. You need to really beat the eggs into the batter, which is why you beat them in individually—or as my grandma’s famous pound cake recipe says “beat to the band.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what that means, but we just always assume it means really whip those eggs in there because the longer you beat the eggs the better your batter will be.

On the other hand, when you add in the flour and milk, you don’t want to beat as long. Once the flour and milk are just barely combined, you want to stop beating to avoid overmixing, which can result in a dense pound cake.

At the end of this recipe, I did have extra lemon juice and while my instinct was to add it to the batter, I chose not to because I was afraid it would be too puckeringly sour. However, in the end, I wish that I had. Unlike lemon extract, fresh lemon juice won’t give you that acidic, cleaning solution-like taste so an extra tablespoon (or two) wouldn’t hurt it.

My one word of advice is to really spray and flour your pan. Because every baker’s biggest fear happened to me when I lifted my Bundt pan and big chunks of the cake were sticking to it. “Oh, that’s nothing a little confectioners’ sugar can’t hide,” I lied to myself as I vigorously dusted sugar snow over the cake.

But, I’m a firm believer that presentation isn’t as important as taste—and boy did this cake taste delicious. It’s light, moist, and pretty flavorful despite the fact that there aren’t any extracts in it. As I said, I wish I’d added more lemon juice, but the cake is still citrus-forward—just not hit-you-in-the-face lemony. The lemon is more on the back end, which makes it a nice, light spring cake.

Whether or not this cake was actually served at the Ritz-Carlton doesn’t matter to me, it’s still a great recipe that I’ll be adding to my spring and summer rotation.