2010 June 27 | The Food Ledger

Cooking with Fel – Orange Yogurt Cake

June 27, 2010

For those who don’t know, the mom is a health freak. Thanks to her, every time I look at a recipe for some kind of baked good, all I can focus on are the number of sticks of butter listed under “Ingredients”. (2 sticks? 3 sticks? Who does this recipe think I am – Paula Deen?!) If it calls for too many sticks of butter, I don’t bake.

Wait, what? Baking without butter?
Yeah, I know. (As you can guess, I bake very, very rarely.)

I had basically resigned myself to a life sans baking until recently, when someone tipped me off to baking with yogurt. I was already familiar with swapping apple sauce for oil in some recipes but to do the same with yogurt and butter? You’ve basically opened up the world for me!

This knowledge came in really handy when I recently had one of my sporadic urges to bake. I knew I had a tub of greek yogurt in the fridge and a quickly went to the web to dig up a good recipe. Wouldn’t you know, my favorite food recipe blog of all time – Smitten Kitchen – had a quick and easy recipe for a yogurt cake. I had no limes so I swapped it for an orange and didn’t bother with the sauce seeing that I had no other fruits in the fridge. (Considering how much food we buy every week, my fridge is always surprisingly bare.)

When I took the final product out of the oven, I was happy to find that the cake itself was actually very fragrant, especially since I zested the entire orange. (I used fresh squeezed juice from that same orange for the recipe too.) Not only that, even though I overbaked it just a tad, it was also quite moist and not too dense. I think, if I make an orange cake the next time around, I’m going to make a cranberry glaze for it…like, oranges and cranberries for the holidays? Who knows. All I know is, be prepared for more baking recipes with yogurt in them!

Orange Yogurt Cake
Modified From: Lime Yogurt Cake with Blackberry Sauce by Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients:

* 1 cup plain unsweetened whole milk yogurt
* 1/3 cup vegetable oil
* 1 cup sugar
* zest of one orange
* 1/4 cup orange juice
* 2 eggs
* 1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/8 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the sides of a 9-inch round cake pan or springform pan with oil and line the bottom with parchment paper if the pan is not springform. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the yogurt, oil, sugar, orange zest and juice. Add the eggs one by one, whisking well after each addition. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together, right over your yogurt batter. Stir with a spoon until just combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack and let stand for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the pan to loosen. If you’re using the springform pan, unclasp the sides. Otherwise, flip the cake onto a plate and flip it back on the rack. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.