Time to offset some of the holiday calories with this low-fat pound cake, as in pound cake made with cottage cheese. Before you grimace, hear me out. It’s good, real good and quite moist, and mostly importantly the texture is as a pound cake should be-dense.
Low Fat Pound Cake
Let’s get this out of the way, and let me say, I don’t diet—I don’t believe in it. So if you think I’m trying to be coy by not mentioning the word “diet” on a blog that obviously pushes full fat, sugar and all the things that will make your skinny jeans protest with side-splitting seams—I’m not. But I do believe in finding balance, so if I over indulge one day, I just scale back the next day—I offset.
Call it semantics if you like. Whatever you call it, you can slice up this low-fat pound cake and feel good about having one or a few slices.
The other reduced fat pound cake recipe you can find is made with cream cheese, but since I already made that here I decided to cut the calories further by using cottage cheese.
I used Martha Stewart’s cream cheese pound cake recipe as the starting point and then quickly realized her recipe is the exact same one as Paula Deen, Food Network and All Recipe. All four of them have the exact cream cheese pound cake recipe? Yes, so I kept the ratios, but changed out the cream cheese for the cottage cheese to make it a low fat pound cake recipe.
Then moving pass the ingredients, I decided to change up the methodology-most significantly, I bypassed creaming the butter for melted butter. Then changed up the remaining order of how the ingredients are mixed with one another. I’m not sure if bypassing “creaming the butter” will work in other cakes, but I can’t wait to find out with my next cake recipe.
Low Fat Pound Cake
Ingredients:
- 1 ½ cups butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
- 8 oz. 4 percent cottage cheese, pureed
- 3 cups sugar
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 6 eggs
- 3 cups all purpose flour
Directions:
Preparation
Heat oven to 350 degrees F | Lightly coat pan with bake spray and flour.
- Place butter in a saucepan over low heat to melt; set aside. Place cottage cheese in a food processor or blender and pulse until pureed and no lumps remain; set aside.
- Fit stand mixer with a paddle attachment and add melted butter, cottage cheese and sugar into stand mixer bowl. Mix on medium-low for 1 minutes or until well combined. Add in vanilla and salt and mix until well combined. While mixer is running, add eggs in one at time and mix well after each addition. Turn mixer down to low and keep mixer running while gradually adding in flour.
- Pour batter into prepared pan and bake at 350 degrees F until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out almost clean, approximately 60-70 minutes. Allow cake to cool in pan for 10 minutes. Turn out cake onto a cooling rack with topside down. Cool completely before cutting.
A few notes:
- For this low-fat pound cake recipe, make sure the cottage cheese is completely pureed with no lumps or else you will have white chunks in your pound cake.
- Since I was experimenting with the ingredients and the methodology, I did not add any glaze or embellishments so could do a visual comparison of my pound cake recipe against a more traditional pound cake. For an easy lemon glaze click here or you can accompany the pound cake with some seasonal berries and a coulis.
- The pound cake will store for up to 3 days at room temperature covered in plastic.
Welcome to my cozy corner where baking meets random thoughts and musings. I’m a self-taught baker sharing all things sweet (and some savory—okay, and cocktails) with a whisk in one hand and a camera in the other. 
This sounds really good! I made a cheesecake with cottage cheese once and after you get over the initial weirdness of using cottage cheese in a sweet dish, the taste and texture were fantastic.
Oh, and I am with you, diet is not a word that’s in my vocabulary. I try to eat healthy, and sometimes I try to eat healthier, but the word diet just freaks me out!
Can’t remember the last time I had pound cake… yum!
I can definitely eat cottage cheese this way… in a cake. Yes!
Gorgeous and love that it’s lower-fat!
Wow you did a great job with this one and lightening the load a bit, so to speak.
The melting vs. creaming the butter. I can’t speak for cakes but I did food science research on this and have googled and put it into practice and did a blog post on it but in a nutshell, with cookies, melting the butter will result in a chewier, flatter and denser cookie; creaming it will result in a dryer, more cake-like cookie. Sort of like brown vs white sugar, chewy vs cakier, in the final result. (probably not telling you anything you dont know here)
Not sure how it translates to cakes, but I’ll be watching your results!
I like cottage cheese, so I would probably love this.
Wow, that’s a STUNNING picture! And, diets are dumb, period.
BEAUTIFUL cake, and gorgeous shots! If this helps at all–If I forgo creaming the butter in a cake recipe, it turns out really dense like a muffin or a pound cake! The crumb isn’t light as a typical cake crumb should be. It would be great to hear how your experiment with creaming/not-creaming turns out!
Sounds delish to me!! Do you think it would work with an even lower fat cottage cheese, or would that be pushing it
I haven’t made pound cake in a while… This looks like the perfect thing to eat with my morning coffee.
I’ve never made pound cake but have always loved the pound cake available at Costco. In high school, it was definitely my go-to snack in between meals. I’m glad you found a low-calorie alternative… I’ll be trying this soon and let you know how it turns out!
I’ve made a pound cake with ricotta before and it was such a nice taste and texture, I want to try cottage cheese now!
Beautiful photo!! Never thought to add cottage cheese to lighten up a pound cake. I just happen to have some in the fridge and the only way it will get eaten is to use it in the cake.
Gorgeous photo and what a great way to lighten up a pound cake! Can’t wait to try it!
That looks super Naomi. And I love love love your tray
Just like how a pound cake should be, dense. I totally agree! With all the fluffy stuff going on, we tend to forget how dense cakes deserves more credit! I definitely love the cottage cheese!
The cake looks gorgeous! No one can say that tha’s a low fat version!! Bookmarked!
Any idea of the nutritional value per slice? I’d love to know the calories, fat, and carbs in it…looks yummy.
Naomi replied: — January 4th, 2012 @ 11:39 pm
Faith-I’m so sorry, I don’t know the nutritional value per slice.
Awesome photo. I never thought about adding cottage cheese to a pound cake. It sounds interesting. I’ll let you know how it turns out when I get around to making it.
Thanks for creating this adaptation, Naomi. I am a pound cake fan! I think I’m going to try the recipe two ways. First, as is, then a second time with a substitution of some lekvar (prune butter) or applesauce for a 1/2 cup of the butter (one-third of the butter used in the recipe). I guess a logical place to add that might be following the blending in of the pureed cottage cheese? I’m interested in seeing how the substitution will affect the pound cake texture. I know it will reduce the fat a bit more and add fiber and more nutrition. As for the effect on flavor, the applesauce or prune butter shouldn’t be markedly noticeable.
If you want to try the idea of reducing the fat further this way, but fear the loss of some of the rich butter flavor with the substitution suggested, you can always add a little butter flavoring in the recipe, as well as prepare the baking pan with butter-flavor cooking spray. For an apple pound cake experiment, use applesauce for a portion of the butter, and add some thin-sliced-and-chopped pieces of Golden Delicious and maybe some apple-pie spice to the batter. Oh, and really nice on the apple version of the cake would be a sprinkling of Brownulated sugar on the top (or bottom) of the batter before baking, or adding a drizzled caramel glaze after baking. (Lol… now, I’m really hungry.)
PS: For any who would like to find out the nutritional values in any recipe, there is an online tool you may like to try:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/mynd/myrecipes/welcome?returnto=/mynd/myrecipes
I’m so excited to make this tonight. I decided I’m going to try a new recipe a week and post it on my blog (http://www.heycaryl.blogspot.com). I posted this on my blog this morning (well the photo and a link back to this amazing post) and in the evening – I post my version with a photo and all.
I hope mine looks as amazing as yours. I love your blog – it’s a frequent read. 
Naomi replied: — January 11th, 2012 @ 5:30 am
Caryl-It looks great! So glad to hear everyone enjoyed it! Thanks for coming back here and posting your results.
YUMMM! This looks absolutely delicious!
I could totally do with some low fat baking after these holidays so thanks for sharing. I absolutely adore your photo too – so rustic and delicious!
The picture for this recipe is totally gorgeous. The golden brown and creamy yellow make my mouth water!
I’m totally intrigued by the use of cottage cheese. Very interesting! Is there a way you went that route vs. sour cream besides experimentation?
Also, just a friendly note – the “click here” about the lemon glaze isn’t a link. Just thought I’d mention it
Naomi replied: — January 11th, 2012 @ 5:32 am
Kaitlin-Ah, thanks for the kind words on the photo. I tried the cottage cheese because a year ago I did a cinnamon roll recipe from Cuisine that used cottage cheese and it turned out fantastic. I really love the moist texture it leaves behind-even more moist than sour cream.
Such a great looking cake and I love the vintage serving tray!
I searched for “low fat cakes” on Google and clicked the link to this site. Although this pound cake looks good, I would never consider this pound cake at all “low-fat.” Six eggs and a still 3 cups of sugar? This is your regular pound cake recipe, except there’s cottage cheese in it.
It might be a little “lower fat” but not really low fat with 1 and a half cup of butter. But it looks delicious!
I had extra cottage cheese lying around, so decided to try this. I loved it, and brought it to work, and my co-workers loved it also. Thanks for the recipe!
Low fat?? By all measures 1 1/2 cups of butter is not low fat! Regardless to how much one wants it to be.
I tried this exactly and it came out super dense and was extremely heavy. The taste is too chewy. Not sure what I did wrong. Can I bake it longer to help fix the density?
Just put mine in the oven! Looking forward to the results!