Mini Lemon Bundt Cakes

Mini lemon Bundt cakes are a brightly colored and delicious treat. Bursting with citrus flavor, this recipe is easy and requires simple ingredients and tools. While they’re not as traditional of a breakfast food as something like chocolate muffins, these cakes are great for a sweet treat to start your morning or enjoy post-dinner. These six cakes can be prepared and baked in under one hour, and the glaze on top is quick to make, too. Featuring sour cream, that finishing touch adds a slight tang and kick to round out the flavor of these little Bundt cakes.

Baking with Bundt Cake Pans

In order to make a true Bundt cake, even the miniature version here, you’ll need a mini Bundt cake pan.

If you’re skeptical of adding another cake pan to your collection, let me say I’ve used my own far more than I’d have imagined since purchasing a few. The designs on the loaf, mini, and full-sized Bundt pans are so beautiful. And here, small individual cakes can make for thoughtful gifts for friends and family.

I’m always surprised to see negative reviews online of Bundt pans. Oftentimes people report that their baked good stuck in the pan. If you’re wondering how do you keep a mini Bundt cake from sticking in the pan, this is totally avoidable.

If you have a high-quality pan that you flour and grease well, you should not have any issues. You can also spray your pan with Baker’s Joy or a homemade equivalent of baker’s release spray. This helps ensure your cakes come easily and cleanly out of your pan once they’ve baked and cooled.

If you’re properly preparing your pan but still having issues, it could be that you need a new pan. As cake pans age, they can lose their ability to conduct heat as well as they once did.

If you’re in search of a mini Bundt cake pan, I love the Heritage pan by Nordicware. This recipe makes about 4.5 cups of batter, so if you’re using a different mini Bundt cake pan, make sure it can handle that much batter. Or plan to have a little extra and bake another individual cake or two.

Ingredients for these Mini Bundt cakes

I love this recipe in large part due to its short and basic ingredient list. You’ll likely already have many of these items in your refrigerator or pantry.

For the mini lemon cakes, you’ll need:

• All-purpose unbleached flour, spooned and leveled
• Baking powder
• Kosher salt
• Eggs
• Granulated sugar
• Lemon zest
• Lemon extract
• Sour cream
• Unsalted butter
• Freshly squeezed lemon juice

Sour cream glaze:

• More lemon zest
• More sour cream
• Powdered sugar

Steps for Making these Small Lemon Cakes

To begin, preheat your oven to 325ºF. Then, grease and flour your mini Bundt cake pan, making sure to cover all nooks and crannies of the six-cavity pan. A silicone brush is super helpful here.

Next, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

Zest both of your lemons. Each will give you about one tablespoon of zest. Half will go in the batter, the other half on the glaze for garnish.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, cream together your sugar, lemon extract, lemon zest, and room temperature butter. Do this for about 4 minutes.

Scrape down your bowl and then in three additions, put your two whole eggs and one egg yolk in your mixing bowl, incorporating each one fully before including the next. Then, mix all eggs on medium-high speed for about 2 minutes. Stop the mixer and scrape bowl’s sides again before pouring sour cream and lemon juice into the bowl. Mix again for about 45 more seconds on medium-high speed.

Add your dry ingredients into the bowl, mixing on a low speed at first to incorporate. Finish with a spatula to avoid over-mixing.  

Spoon batter into your greased and floured mini Bundt cake pan until each cavity is approximately 3/4 full.  

Bake for 20-22 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cakes comes out clean. 

Remove cakes from the oven and leave them in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Invert the cakes onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

Sour Cream Lemon Glaze

As the cakes cool, begin making the lemon glaze. On a low power in a small bowl in the microwave, heat sour cream for about 5 seconds at a time until it’s slightly warm and spreadable. Add your powdered sugar to the bowl of warmed sour cream, and whisk until ingredients are fully incorporated. Taste test the glaze until it’s your desired flavor. Add more sour cream for tang and powdered sugar for sweetness.

Pour a generous amount of glaze onto fully cooled mini cakes, and garnish with lemon zest.

Baking Tips for these Mini Lemon Cakes

• Grease your pan well – Following this step ensures that your cakes release nicely and cleanly after they’ve baked and cooled.
• Pour your batter close to the top of each Bundtlette cavity – Don’t worry about overflow. These cakes don’t rise much above the fill line once they’ve exited the oven and cooled. However, if you would like to make them perfectly flat, you can trim their bottoms.
• Use fresh ingredients – I once followed a cake recipe perfectly, only to bite into a pretty mediocre-tasting dessert. I couldn’t figure out why, until I saw that the oil I used had expired a few months back! For this recipe or any other that you make, double-check all your expiration dates to ensure everything is still good to use. And use your senses. If an ingredient looks or smells “off,” trust your gut and ditch it.
• Use a kitchen scale for accuracy in baking – Weighing your ingredients and writing or following a recipe using a standard metric like grams ensures consistency. I highly recommend investing $30 or less in a kitchen scale.

Bundt Cake FAQs

More Dessert Recipes

If lemon isn’t your style, maybe you’ll appreciate these mini apple Bundt cakes instead. I also have a mini cranberry Bundt cake recipe.

More in the mood to bake cookies? Check out this Biscoff butter cookie sandwich recipe – it’s so tasty and quickly becoming one of my favorite cookie recipes to make!

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