2 Ingredient Lemon Glaze

March 15, 2025 Erin Clarkson

Stop guessing ratios - I have the perfect ones for you! This simple lemon glaze can be made in 2 minutes and sets hard. It is perfect for cakes, cookies, loaf cakes, and pound cakes!

Hi hi! I am just popping in to quickly share the recipe for my 2 ingredient lemon glaze with you! This seems like a slightly silly thing to make a recipe for but I got sick of trying to eyeball quantities and never end up with them quite right, and a glaze which is too runny or too thick. I was looking for the perfect lemon glaze for pound cake, and made it so many times I figured I needed to share it with you.

So here you are - the perfect lemon glaze! I love to use it to glaze my vanilla pound cake recipe, and to paint onto sugar cookies, but it also works on a huge variety of baked goods. Scale it as you like!

Do I have to use fresh lemon juice for lemon glaze?

Yes. Fresh lemon juice makes such a huge difference when it comes to flavour, and when a glaze recipe only has two ingredients, you're better off making sure that they taste good.

If you don't have lemon on hand, I have also made this with lime juice and it was super delicious!

How much lemon glaze does this recipe make?

This is always a tricky one because it depends how glaze heavy of a person you are. I make a single batch of this for glazing a pound cake, and would probably use a single batch for my sugar cookies too.

If you are making this lemon glaze just as a drizzle over something like thumbprint cookies or shortbread you may need a little less - I do find that it is harder to get the right consistency when you make a small batch though, so I would make it as written. The batch size is already pretty small.

Can Lemon Glaze be made ahead of time?

Ideally you will make this glaze as soon as you need it, as it does go crusty as it dries. If you have leftover you want to store you can pop it into a ziploc bag and seal with no air in it so that it does not go crusty, then just snip the end off the bag and use it as a piping bag to use the rest of the glaze.

Can this lemon glaze be piped?

I haven't tried it - I generally use my 2 ingredient sugar cookie icing for that! It is made with milk so I find that it is a little better for piping, but if you made this lemon glaze recipe slightly thicker it would likely work ok for piping too.

Should the baking be warm or cool when I glaze it?

It depends what you are making, - for something like my sugar cookies, I like to leave them to stand for 5 minutes and then glaze while they are still warm so that the glaze melts into the pattern.

For something like a pound cake, you want to wait until the cake is cool. I like to use a pastry brush to paint the glaze directly onto the surface of the cake.

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