Needed a dessert, but had multiple limitations placed upon me by Grandmom’s diet (No dairy, no nuts, no chocolate…) so decided on lemon cake. Found a recipe for lemon pound cake with lemon sauce, but then found these lemon pudding cakes and decided to try them instead.

I warning in the recipe would have been nice–the batter is extremely runny, and the egg whites just didn’t want to fold in smoothly. But all in all it tasted pretty good. Will I make it again? Haven’t decided yet.

Lemon Pudding Cake
2 tbsp butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
2 large eggs, separated and at room temperature
2 tbsp lemon zest
2 tbsp flour
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 fresh lemon juice
1 cup milk
boiling water

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease six 6-ounce ramekins. Place the ramekins inside a rectangular baking dish.

Beat egg whites to soft peaks. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy (here is where I first ran into difficulty. 2 tbsp of butter is not a lot, esp with 2/3 cup sugar. Fluffy just didn’t happen. Especially since I put the sugar and lemon zest together in the food processor to mince the zest) Add egg yolks and beat. Add flour, (lemon zest), and salt and beat until combined. Add lemon juice and milk and mix well. You’ll need to scrape down the sides of the bowl several times, and the batter is going to be extremely runny.

Using a spatula, fold in the egg whites. Pour batter into ramekins.

Place ramekins in a large baking dish, place the baking bowl in the oven, then add boiling water to the baking dish.

Bake 20 to 35 minutes, until tops are brown. Cakes will still be jiggly.

Remove ramekins from baking disk and allow to cool for 1 1/2 hours. Either run a paring knife along the inside of the dish and invert the cakes onto a plate or just serve them in the ramekins.

Cakes will shrink somewhat.