Pucker Up!

My parents live in Florida, which at this time of year is brimming with citrus. On her last visit, my mother brought with her a couple of beautiful Meyer lemons grown on her very own lemon tree!! Very exciting!! I had one left, and I could tell that it was pretty much at the point of use it or lose it. And I didn't want to lose it... While this was a very large lemon, I was pretty sure there wouldn't be enough juice to make a lemon meringue pie or lemon bars, so I went in search of something different. While I was going to be searching anyway, I decided to throw cranberries into the mix. There was a great deal on sweetened dried cranberries at the wholesale club store yesterday, and the combination of lemon and cranberry sounded too good to pass up. I found this recipe for a Cranberry Lemon Cake. It looked very good, very simple, and very quick. Quick was important... Little Girl's naps have been very short recently, and I wanted something I might be able to get accomplished while she slept. I think that the recipe intends for the baker to use fresh whole cranberries in this cake, which I could have done but didn't. Maybe some other time... I also decided that I wanted to play some more with my new silicon brownie bites pan. Because why not?! So I turned the cake into Cranberry Lemon Cake Bites. And there was also enough extra batter to make eight cupcakes to go along with the bites... The more the merrier. Or tastier, as the case may be...

I also made one other addendum to the recipe. As pretty as the cakes looked, I thought they might benefit from a little something more... So I made a glaze for the top. To try to match the vanilla extract and lemon in the cake, I made the glaze using 1 cup of powdered sugar, a tablespoon of vanilla soy milk and a splash of lemon extract (I would have used lemon juice, but I used all of it in the cake). A little drizzling and a new masterpiece is made! This is a nice combination of sweet and tart. And in fun bite sized portions! Woohoo!