My husband’s great grandmother was truly a wonderful lady. I was fortunate enough to get to know her for 4 years before she passed away. I never got to know her as well as I would have liked, but I knew two things about her for certain: She loved her great grandson, and she could sho’ nuff make some delicious desserts.
She had some cookbooks made for friends and family several years before her passing that had lots of her yummy recipes in them. I haven’t tried all of them yet, but I’m working on it! When my husband and I were dating, I remember her making a batch of these special little lemon cakes. My husband LOVED them so much, and once I tried them for myself, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. I understood why my husband loved them so much!
He was so crazy about them, that he actually had these on his grooms table during our wedding day. (Instead of having one grooms cake, he had a selection of his favorite desserts.) Grandmama had already gone to be with the Lord when we got married, but her daughter whipped up at least 500 of these bad boys for our friends and family to enjoy on our big day. I know Grandmama was certainly smiling down on us, and it was so nice to have something of hers there with us.
Now we make these every single year during the holidays. My little brother actually called me recently and put in a special request to have these for dessert on Thanksgiving day. I’ve had several people ask me for the recipe, and I’m so happy to share it with others.
Here’s what you’ll need to make these: You’ll need miniature muffin tins and wire drying racks for this recipe
Grandmama's Glazed Lemon Cakes - Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 box yellow cake mix + ingredients on back of cake box
- 2 oranges
- 2 lemons
- 1 1/2 box confectioners sugar
Instructions
- Make the icing first:
- Lightly grate rinds from oranges and lemons into a bowl. Be very careful not to grate too deep into the white part of the rind, as this can turn your icing a bit bitter.
- Squeeze the juice from the lemons and oranges and mix with grated zest
- Whisk in confectioners sugar until smooth
- To make the cakes:
- Preheat oven to 350 F
- Make cake batter according to box instructions
- Spray miniature muffin tins with non-stick cooking spray
- Fill tins HALF way full with batter - not all the way to the top
- Bake for 12 minutes or until done
- While the cakes are still hot, dunk each cake into the icing completely and set on wire rack to drain off excess juice
- Once glaze cools and hardens, they're ready to eat!
Tried this recipe?
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That’s it, y’all! Making them is pretty easy. The hard part is not eating half of the batch in one sitting! The cakes absorb a lot of the icing, making these treats perfectly sticky and sweet. These are absolutely finger lickin’ good, no doubt about that!
If you like this recipe, you’ll definitely want to check out my recipe for Lemon Poppy Seed Bread, too!
I love lemon and these look/ sound so good! I can’t wait to try them!
I just tasted one of Grandmama’s Glazed Lemon Cakes and it was absolutely delicious! Thank you so much for the recipe!
I love lemon, I really want to try this recipe. Thank you for sharing it.
That is a nice story, and these do look really good, and different, too! I’d love to try it!
These sound so amazing and light. Recipes passed down by family always are the best!