Ingredients:
2 cups milk
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 cup canola oil
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
juice and zest of 1 Meyer lemon
1/2 cup diced candied lemon peel*
for the glaze
1/4 cup Meyer lemon juice
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Spray with baking spray or grease and flour one Bundt pan. Set aside.
In a large bowl or bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the milk, juice, sugar, eggs, oil, and vanilla until smooth. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder. and zest. With the mixer running, stream in the dry ingredients and beat until well-incorporated. Fold in the diced candied lemon peel. Scrape into prepared Bundt pan.
Bake for 50 minutes or until a thin knife inserted in the cake comes out with just a few damp crumbs.
Cool 10 minutes in the pan on a wire rack, then remove and cool completely on the wire rack.
Whisk together the glaze ingredients in a small bowl. Drizzle cake with glaze then sprinkle with additional candied lemon peel if desired prior to serving. The glaze can be doubled if you want a really well-coated cake. Store leftovers at room temperature.
*You can use homemade but I used Paradise candied lemon peel which is already cubed.
My thoughts:
I was really excited to see Meyer lemons at Aldi** recently. Not only were they pretty cheap, they can be tricky to find here in the mid-Atlantic. It is thought they may be the result of a spontaneous cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange which makes sense to me, they have the brightness of a lemon but are sweeter and more mellow like an orange.
I like using them in baked goods because they have that sweet-tart quality I like in a fruity dessert. Here they flavor the cake and the glaze and get a little bit of help from the candied lemon peel, since citrus flavors tend to fade during the baking process. It is a pretty plain cake so you don’t want to skip on the lemon flavor!
This cake is super quick to put together because it uses oil instead of butter so you can (as I did) decide to make a cake and have it in the oven in less than 10 minutes. It takes a while to bake and cool but the mixing part couldn’t be faster or simpler.
The cake is so good! Light yet moist at the same time.
**Shameless plug for my Aldi fan blog here.
