It’s cherry season! Well some where it is. While on my weekly shopping trip, I came across some beautiful cherries at my local grocer. The first thing that came to mind was my cherry loaf recipe. I haven’t made it in a while, but it turned out as delicious as I remembered it to be. With a hint of lemon rind, this is a very flavorful loaf.
Cherries can be subbed with other fruit like plums
Cherry Lemon Loaf
Ingredients
- 1-1/2 cups cake and pastry flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 cup plain yogurt
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 large eggs
- lemon zest from 1 lemon
- ¼ teaspoon almond extract
- ½ cup vegetable oil
- 1-1/2 cups cherries pitted, fresh or frozen
- ½ cup pecans for topping
Lemon Glaze:
- juice from ½ lemon
- ½ cup Icing sugar or more
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9×5? loaf pan, with parchment paper.
- In a medium bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, and salt, set aside.
- In a mixing bowl, beat together the yogurt, sugar, eggs, lemon zest, almond extract, and oil.
- Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Beat 3 – 4 minutes, scraping sides of bowl.
- Pour 1/3 of the batter into the pan, add 1/3 of the cherries, repeat.
- Top with pecans.
- Bake 50-55 minutes, or until knife comes out clean.
- If cake is becoming too dark near the end of baking time, loosely drape a piece of aluminum foil over cake for the last 15 minutes.
- Let loaf cool in the pan for 10 minutes, remove from loaf pan onto wire rack, let cool.
- To make lemon glaze: squeeze juice out of lemon (the one the rind was taken from) mix with enough icing sugar to make a smooth glaze to pour over cake.
- When loaf is cool, drizzle with lemon glaze and cool until glaze hardens.
Here are more cake recipes for cakes with fruit:
Came out delicious!
The recipe baked up fine, but I found the almond extract to be somewhat overbearing and completely hid the lemon zest. Have you ever tried this recipe with lemon extract?
Hi David I’m sure you could try the pure vanilla extract as a substitute, vanilla seems to go with any dessert. I have tried the pure lemon extract in other recipes but found it very strong and did’t like the taste, although you could try a couple drops of the lemon extract and let me know what you think. I’d love to know, thanks 🙂
Thanks for that suggestion. I, too, think that a little lemon extract goes a long way. I may retry this recipe today with a combination of vanilla and lemon and will let you know.
Yes, thank you let me know 😊
The flavour is there, but I think this might fare better with all-purpose flour, not cake/pastry — its texture is gummy, perhaps there’s too much oil, not a very nice crumb. 2.5 stars.
Hi Andrew, thanks for trying my recipe. I use both cake and pastry flour and all-purpose flour depending on what I have on hand. I’ve always had great results with this recipe. I’m in Canada and our all-purpose flour is very versatile, great for cakes and breads. It’s also a good practise to check the dates on ingredients.
Hi,
I made this recipe and it was fantastic! I then tried making it another time and when I removed it from the oven it sunk. I was very careful when scaling the amounts of each ingredient, but, I did use a different type of yogurt, do you think that could have affected it?
Please help!
That’s so disapointing! I feel your frustration its happened to me on several occasions with different cake recipes. I’m going to guess its not the type of yogurt you used. Sometimes the size of the cake pan could be the reason. This recipe works best in a loaf pan. Sometimes the baking powder is all of a sudden not good anymore. Maybe there was too much moisture in the cherries which made the batter runny. Next time use one of those wooden chopsticks and stick it right in the middle, if any dough gets stuck to it bake the cake a little longer. I hope it works out for you next time.
Just made and it’s really good, subtle sweetness. Used fresh, pitted cherries. Loved the pecans on top. Reminds me of a coffee cake because it’s not oversweet. Enjoyed it, thanks!!
Glad you enjoyed it! Cherries are my favourite to use in this cake.
Welp……finally used up my “going bad” cherries to make this and forgot the oil. Wonder what it will taste like?
I hope it worked out for you!!
If you are using frozen cherries do you defrost and drain the juices first. Once the loaf is baked can it be frozen with or without the glaze. Looking forward to your response
Hi Marsha, Definitely drain the liquid that may come with your cherries. When I use frozen cherries that are packed in syrup, I’ll give them a quick rinse and dry with some paper towel, you don’t want soggy batter.
If you are going to freeze the whole cake don’t frost it. Wrap it up tightly in foil and freeze. When you are ready to thaw the cake, leave it on the counter for about an hour still wrapped in the foil then bake it in the foil at 350°F for about 10 minutes. While cake is warm frost it. It’ll taste like its fresh baked!
Thanks for catching that! I alternate between the 2 extracts depending on what I'm making. For the cherry loaf I do use almond extract. Although almond extract is not commonly found in most peoples kitchens , so substituting with vanilla extract is O.K. too.
Do you use almond extract or vanilla extract–recipe shows both.