Mini Lemon Bundt Cakes
These mini lemon bundt cakes are the perfect dessert for your next Friday Night Dinner because they aren’t king sized candy bars.
No matter what store I’m at, I always hit up the clearance section. Always. You never know what you’re going to find, and you might stumble onto something you actually need anyway. Of course, you have to have some kind of restraint or you’ll end up a hoarder, but I can normally control myself. Anyway, about a month ago, I found some mini lemon bundt pans for super cheap.
I was even sort of hesitant about them, but literally that night, I was watching Gilmore Girls and Emily served mini lemon bundt cakes at Friday Night Dinner. I almost freaked out. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. It was the Gilmore gods – Lorelai the first to be exact – smiling down on me. Right? Ok, maybe not, but I was so excited about making mini lemon bundt cakes.
And about a week later, I found a giant bag of Meyer lemons at Costco, so those mini lemon bundt cakes turned into mini Meyer lemon bundt cakes, and an amazing recipe was born. Every bit worthy of Emily Gilmore, and even more worthy of this Friday Night Dinner series.
More dairy free cake recipes:
Ingredients
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon coarse salt
- 3/4 cup dairy free milk
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1 teaspoon lemon extract
- 1 cup vegetable shortening
- 2 cups sugar
- Zest of 4 lemons about 3 – 4 tablespoons – cream together
- 4 large eggs
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 2 – 3 tablespoons lemon juice
- Cooking spray
- Mini bundt cake pans
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350˚F and spray pans with cooking spray.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients, set aside.
- In a small bowl, whisk together the milk, lemon juice and lemon extract. Set aside.
- In a large bowl with an electric mixer, cream shortening, sugar and lemon zest at a medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes.
- Add eggs, one at a time, beating until incorporated.
- Add both dry flour mixture and milk mixture, alternating between each.
- Divide the batter equally between cake molds.
- Bake for 20 – 25 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
- Remove from oven and let cool completely before removing cakes from pan.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together frosting ingredients.
- When cakes have cooled, drizzle with frosting.
Nutrition
Recipe adapted from Ina Garten.
I fixed this tonight for Easter..awesome…I only did 1/2 of the icing and it was plenty..really really enjoyed a lighter dessert!
Today I used my new mini bundt pans for the first time!
Thanks for this great recipe!
I found the prep was a bit longer than 20 mins, as prepping lemons is time consuming. I made 3 changes-
1)I had 3 cups cake flour on hand.
2) used 50/50 butter and shortening
3) just had to put 3 blueberries on each cake!
Lastly, this batch yielded far more than 12 mini cakes…+ 24
Mini muffins, and 1- 8″ round
Partially filled!
Shared with our friends…
They were thrilled!
I echo the previous comment, this recipe made 39 mini-bunds. The taste was good, maybe a bit too sweet but that’s easy to adjust.
My only criticism is that the batter expands too much, for lack of a better term. It’s too fluffy for mini bundts so you lose all definition – they end up looking more like mini-doughnuts.
Am I the only one that found the recipe a little confusing? The instructions say: “In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.”
But then a few steps later it says to cream the shortening and sugar together. Wasn’t the sugar part of the “dry ingredients”?
I proceeded on and was able to salvage the recipe and it was actually delicious!
My other problem is that the bundts did not come out of the pan at all. I will try butter and flour coating rather than cooking spray.
I will try this recipe again and update you.
It seems like sugar should be a dry ingredient, but in the world of baking, sugar is actually a wet ingredient.
The mini bundt cakes were a failure. I Pam sprayed the pan and dusted with flour. They rose up during baking and all were touching. I tried to get them out but they crumbled up. So I dug them out with a spoon. The flavor was good and the birds were happy.