Easy Fix For Dry Pound Cake

Looking for an Easy Fix for Dry Pound Cake?  You’ve come to the right place!

Remember this Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake from last week?  Looked beautiful, pictures came out nice, all good, right? 

Well, I have a confession….it did look nice and had a wonderful lemony taste but…..it was DRY.

Just to be clear…this is no fault of the recipe.  It was simply left in the oven a little too long.  Although, the recipe was followed and a timer set. I honestly believe it’s my oven.  It doesn’t cook as consistently as it should. Sometimes it cooks faster than the recipes says and sometimes it’s slower.

Nevertheless, we had a dry Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake on our hands…not so dry it felt like you were choking when you swallowed or too dry to serve your family, just not what you’d typically want to serve other people.  And OF COURSE, it wasn’t just for our family, we were supposed to take it to church.  GREAT!  This isn’t the first time we’ve had something like this happen.  Remember Red Velvet Trifle?   

After doing a little research I realized most solutions to dry pound cake involved brushing them with some sort of “adult beverage”.  That’s not really our thing here at O Taste and See, so I came up with another solution.  

Thankfully, there’s an Easy Fix for Dry Pound Cake….Flavored Simple Syrup!

A simple syrup is just that, simple.  It combines equal parts sugar and water with a flavoring of choice.  It can then be used for sweetening cold drinks, dressing fruit salads, making sorbet or in my case…moistening dry cakes!  Often bakers use it for added flavor and moistness before putting together a layer cake…even if they don’t need it. 

Here’s the Recipe:

Recipe can be adjusted for amount needed.  I used lemon juice to flavor because my cake was lemon but the syrup can be infused with a variety of juices or herbs.  Syrups can be made ahead and kept in the refrigerator until ready to use.

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

juice of 1 lemon (small)

Combine all three in a small sauce pan over medium high heat

Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar is completely dissolved.  It can be allowed to reduce slightly but don’t boil more than a couple of minutes

Remove from heat and allow to cool a couple of minutes

Cut cake in slices and brush both sides with syrup

Arrange on a nice serving platter and no one will ever know!