What I Made Monday: Euna Mae's Lemon Glazed Cake

I hope y'all had a good weekend.  We packed up and went to Mountain Home, Arkansas (my hometown) to see my parents, fish on the White River, swim, relax and enjoy one of the fleeting weekends of summer. This particular weekend home, I drove my kids around town to show them the first house I remember my grandparents living in.  I told them the story of hiding real, hard-boiled Easter eggs in that house and having one less egg show up in our count....and how our noses helped locate the missing egg weeks later behind a sofa in the formal living room.   I told them how vividly I remember my papa standing in front of the fireplace in that house, warming his backside, and always whistling a little tune that no one knew - but always recognized.   My papa died only weeks before I married Sam; but my children have memories of my grannie.  They remembered how she dressed, how she laughed, and that she always had lemon drops and cold Coke in cans at her house.  

My kids have heard me say often enough that they can recite it back to me...."I get my love of Lemon from my Grannie Nelson."  Not only did she always have lemon drops in glass candy jars here and there, but she made a lemon glazed cake that the family came to love.  We would find ourselves calculating how many of us there were and how many slices a cake would make.  We were very territorial about whose icing on the cake plate belonged to whose slice.  And we'd be quite competitive over who got to scoop out the treasure-trove of icing that had pooled in the center well of the bundt. There wasn't a holiday or a get-together that Grannie Nelson's lemon glazed cake didn't join us.  And after years of countless requests for the recipe, she put her hands over her mouth and giggled and told me it was from the side of the Duncan Hines box. She had tweaked it a little to make it her own, as I have now done with the recipe.  But any way you slice it, it's delicious and summery and family favorite for generations.

EUNA MAE'S LEMON GLAZED CAKE

1 package Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Lemon Supreme Cake Mix

1 (3.4 oz) package instant lemon pudding mix

4 large eggs, room temperature

3/4 cup water

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon good vanilla

For the icing:

1 package softened cream cheese

1 stick softened unsalted butter

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

3-4 cups powdered sugar

milk for thinning

Preheat oven for 350 degrees.  Grease and flour a 10" bundt pan.

Sift the cake mix and pudding mix together in a bowl. At medium speed, beat the eggs, water, lemon juice, and oil for two minutes. Add the sifted dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix for another minute till well combined.  Stir in vanilla.  Pour into prepared pan and bake 50 to 60 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.  Cool in the pan for 25 minutes.  Invert onto a serving plate.  Cool completely before icing.

For the icing, beat cream cheese, butter, and lemon juice together til smooth.  Add 1 cup of powdered sugar at a time until well incorporated and smooth.  Icing should be just thin enough that it will coat the cake nicely while slowly creeping down the sides. May thin with milk a tablespoon at a time until desired consistency.