One-Bowl Lemon Cake With Citrus Glaze

Author Notes

I’ve been making lemon snacking cakes since back in the day. And I’ve been eating them for even longer than that. As a child, my grandmother used to make me a “lemon velvet cake.” Her cake was assembled in a 9x13-inch pan, and although I am a firm believer that such a pan delivers a sheet cake, and not a snacking cake, for the sake of my story, I’m throwing accuracy to the wind. Sitting at my grandmother’s plastic-covered dining room table (the plastic only came off for company—IYKYK), as a little kid, swinging my legs, as my feet were yet to reach the ground, and enjoying slices of her lemon snacking cake is one of my earliest and best food memories. Such a good one in fact, that I even developed my own version of my grandmother’s cake, which you can check outhere. So like I said, lemon snacking cakes and I go way back.

Here, however, I shake things up and add some ricotta to the mix, which results in a fluffier cake, than one without the cheese, that is sweet, but not too sweet and deeply lemon-y due to copious amounts of zest and juice. I also like to add a little lemon extract, for extra zing, but if extracts are not your jam, by all means leave it out. The recipe calls for what I consider to be a generous amount of ricotta and when first developing it, I used much less, thinking that I could just substitute the ricotta one-for-one for the dairy I would typically add to a lemon snacking cake. But I was underwhelmed. A little ricotta cake research ensued, and lo and behold I realized when peeps go ricotta, they go big or go home. I basically doubled the amount (and added an extra egg) and honestly I could not be more excited about this cake (my first foray into ricotta baking, if you must know…). The glaze is sweet, so consider yourself warned, and if you want to pull back on that, reduce the sugar—just know that less sugar means a thinner glaze and probably a disdainful, sideways glance from my grandmother (she liked things sweet). —Jessie Sheehan