DIY Elevated Trader Joe's Lemon Mini Sheet Cake Recipe

Trader Joe's has mastered many things. Between the ready-to-heat frozen microwave meals, unique pasta shapes, and endless interesting dips, the store is a gold mine for putting together creative and easy meals. Perhaps best of all are TJ's ready-made mini desserts, all cleverly sized to be big enough to share but also just small enough to justify eating on your own. The mini sheet cakes, which are uniquely sized to be just smaller than a jelly roll pan, are fluffy, moist, flavorful, and perfect for a quick and easy sweet treat.

I love the convenience of a ready-to-eat baked treat, but nothing tastes as good as desserts made at home (even if the dessert is from Trader Joe's). The lemon mini sheet cake is easy to make with ingredients you likely already have on hand — all you need is a small, 8x8-inch cake pan and a few extra lemons. The bright, zesty, moist vanilla cake is topped with cream cheese frosting speckled with even more lemon, and perfectly replicates Trader Joe's popular seasonal mini sheet cake flavor for the perfect sweet and summery mini-sized cake at home.

To make the vanilla cake base, you'll need cake flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, milk, vanilla extract, an egg, butter, lemon juice, lemon zest, and sour cream, which makes cakes richer and more moist. For the frosting, you'll need more butter, lemon, lemon zest, and vanilla, as well as cream cheese and powdered sugar.

Preheat the oven to 350 F and line an 8x8-inch cake pan with parchment.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.

In another bowl, combine ¼ cup milk, vanilla, sour cream, and the egg.

Add the softened butter, lemon juice, and ¼ cup milk to the flour mixture. Beat with an electric mixer until moistened.

Slowly stream the egg mixture into the batter while mixing, scraping the sides to incorporate. When the batter is just combined, stir in the lemon zest.

Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Let the cake cool completely on a wire rack while preparing the frosting.

To prepare the frosting, first beat the cream cheese and butter together until smooth.

Add the lemon juice and vanilla and beat to incorporate. Slowly add the powdered sugar, beating until fluffy and combined.

Fill a piping bag fitted with a circular tip with the frosting. Frost the cake in neat rows running horizontally across.

Top with lemon zest to serve.

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This sheet cake is designed to fit best in an 8x8-inch square cake pan, which is slightly larger than Trader Joe's disposable cake container but far smaller than typical 9x13-inch sheet-cake pans. If you don't have an 8x8-inch pan but want to make the cake, you can use a 9x9-inch pan, which will result in a thinner cake that's about 1 inch tall. The cook time only differs by about 5 minutes — and though the surface area is larger in the bigger pan, the cake is thinner, so that's the one you'll want to bake a little less.

This same science applies to most other pans, too — if the pan is larger, the cake will be thinner and will need less time to cook. If the pan is smaller, the cake will be even taller and may need more time to cook. Where the conversion gets tricky is when you use a rimmed sheet pan, which is technically the correct way to make a sheet cake. If you're using a jelly roll or an eighth-sheet pan, pour the batter into the pan until it comes to about halfway to two-thirds of the way up the sides, and be careful not to overfill it. Then, bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

The Trader Joe's sheet cakes are all decorated uniformly with horizontal rows of frosting. Though the cakes in the store are likely decorated by machine, you can make a pretty good copy of them using tools at home. For example, you can pipe neat rows across the top using a large round 1A tip or the flat side of a 47 basketweave tip, working the frosting across the top one row at a time until the cake is filled.

You can also add the frosting onto the cake, smooth it with an offset spatula, then use a large cake decorating comb to leave uniform indents across the top, ending up with a result that's similar to the Trader Joe's store-bought version. This method is easiest and fastest, and works well if you want to save yourself the mess of a piping bag. Of course, you can also get as creative as you want with decorating the cake — after all, that's the beauty of making it yourself.

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