Mini Lemon Olive Oil Cakes 🍋

🌿🌹🐣🐇 Happy Easter! 🐇🐣🌹🌿

It's Easter 2020, and most of us who celebrate are celebrating indoors. The world is several weeks into our COVID-19 quarantine, and with so much time on our hands, what better time to try new recipes? What better time to make lemons into...lemon cake!

We came across several recipes for Lemon Olive Oil cake, and thought we'd create our own. The result is sweet and savory mini lemon cakes, perfectly paired with coffee or ice cream. For our mini cakes, we used our Spring themed Nordic Ware Backyard Bugs Baking Pan.

This recipe filled our Backyard Bugs pan twice, and would easily yield enough batter for 1 bundt pan, two 8" cake pans, one 9" x 13" sheet cake pan, or two dozen cupcakes.

We created a simple lemon glaze for our cakes, to show off the cute bug details, but these little cakes would be perfect with a lemon cream cheese icing, or just a dusting of powdered sugar.

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Ingredients:

Cake:
1 white or yellow cake mix
1 package of vanilla or lemon pudding mix
3 eggs
2 lemons
1/2 cup of water
1/2 cup of olive oil
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract

Lemon Glaze:
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tbsp. of butter
5 tbsp. of white granulated sugar
Limoncello (optional)


Weapons of Choice:

Large mixing bowl
Electric mixer
Cake pans of choice (greased and dusted with flour)
Juicer
Knife
Small microwave-safe bowl
Zester or fine grater
Measuring cup and spoon
Toothpicks


Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 °

In large mixing bowl, combine cake mix, pudding mix, water, olive and vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. On medium-high speed, beat mixture until fully blended.

Using a zester or fine grater, zest the skin of both lemons, and add to cake batter. Slice both lemons, and juice well. Strain lemon juice, and reserve half of the juice for your glaze or icing. Add half of your lemon juice to cake batter. Scrape pulp from strainer, and both lemons; extract and discard seeds. Mince lemon pulp well, and add to cake batter.

On low speed, incorporate lemon into cake batter.

Pour half of your cake batter into each greased/floured pan. Bake at 350° for 27 minutes, or until center of cakes pass the toothpick test.

Directions for Glaze:

Add juice of one lemon, two tbsp. of butter, and 5 tbsp. of sugar to a small bowl. Microwave for two minutes. Add one to two tbsp. Limoncello (optional). Stir well. Let glaze cool and thicken before pouring over cakes.

Dust with powdered sugar or lemon zest (optional)

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