Extra lemony Lemon Thyme Bundt Cake

Lemon juice, zest and extract brighten this light, fragrant, summery cake. Recipe below.

INSPIRATION FOR OUR RECIPES COMES FROM MANY PLACES. THIS ONE STARTED IN OUR GARDEN. The thyme in our garden, which for years has been a charming, compact clump, has all at once gone crazy. It’s surging onto the walk; it’s galumphing up to its neighbors (aster and coneflowers) in an entirely too pushy way; it’s become completely overconfident and obnoxious.

Where last year I would have cut it back thoughtfully, with careful harvesting and snips here and there, this year, to be frank, I’ve resorted to pulling it out by the handfuls and throwing the clumps on the compost pile. It needs to settle down. But having the beautiful scent of thyme on my hands (and entire self) is why I decided to make this cake.

This cake is a bit fiddly and uses rather a lot of kitchen ware, but the reward is a fragrant, tangy, moist wonder. To be sure it’s sufficiently lemony, we include three different sources of lemon—zest, juice, and extract—and the volume of thyme gives it a lovely vegetal bouquet. In fact, if you like, use even more. And olive oil replaces the usual butter, making it a less guilty pleasure.

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Lemon Thyme Cake

Lemon juice, zest and extract brighten this light, fragrant, summery cake.

Servings 12 or so slices

Equipment

• 6-cup bundt pan

Ingredients

• 1-3/4 cups unbleached white flour
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
• 2 tablespoons lemon zest
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 3 large eggs
• 2/3 cup whole milk
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• powdered sugar (optional)

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350ºF. Put the flour, salt and baking powder in a medium bowl and stir lightly with a fork. Set aside.
• Pulse the sugar and thyme leaves in a food processor, then pour into a large mixing bowl.
• Add the lemon zest, olive oil and eggs to the bowl. Using a hand mixer at medium-high, beat for three minutes. The mixture will become uniform and smooth and a lighter yellow.
• On low, mix in the milk. Then add the lemon juice, lemon extract and vanilla extract, and mix them in on low.
• Add in the flour mixture, a third at a time, and mix just until everything is blended.
• Pour and scrape the batter into an oiled bundt pan (don’t oil the pan until just before you fill it!). Put the pan in the center of the oven.
• Set a timer for 45 minutes, but this may take a bit longer. The cake is ready when a tester comes out clean and the edges are slightly pulling away from the sides. Note that at this point the top of the cake may not be golden. but when you invert it out of the pan, the rest of the cake will be the perfect golden color.
• Cool the pan on a rack for 10 or 15 minutes, then gently loosen the sides with a knife and invert the cake onto a plate. Let it cool entirely.
• If you like, garnish with powdered sugar. This is nice served with fresh raspberries or sliced strawberries, or a bit of vanilla ice cream, and it is totally delightful all on its own.

Kitchen Notes

Liz’s Crockery Corner. This sweet piece of pale blue English transferware is our latest find, picked up in a sprawling antique mall in Denver in early May. It is so pretty and flawless, and it was so hard to find out anything about it via the usual sources, that for a couple of weeks I thought I’d purchased a 20th century fake.

The other day I decided to poke around online one more time, using slightly different keywords, and I’m glad I did. This plate, it turns out, is in the Ivanhoe pattern, made by Podmore Walker & Co of Staffordshire some time between 1834 and 1856. The pattern’s name straight-up steals the title of Sir Walter Scott’s influential novel, originally published in 1819 and, by the 1830s, well on its way to becoming one of the most popular books of the 19th century. Is there anything in this pattern that evokers the plot of Ivanhoe? Nope. What it is: a lovely, straightforward example of transferware from that period, a vaguely nostalgic, vaguely romantic, vaguely country scene. And as for Ivanhoe the novel, Wikipedia has a concise summary of the plot here. And if you really, really want to read the whole book, here it is on Project Gutenberg .