A yoghurt cake…infallible and so easy even your young children can bake it! Everything gets measured with the one yoghurt pot, perfect for someone like me who hates dishes!

La recette:

Pincée de sel:

• Choose either the syrup OR the icing
• One cup of joghurt = 125 g.

• Use as a dessert when you’ve added a syrup to your cake and serve with whipped cream and caramelized or fresh  orange slices. (Caramelize orange slices in pan on stove with some sugar and a little butter/orange juice)
• Use lemon juice in place of orange juice.
• Separate the egg whites , beat until stiff and fold in last for a lighter cake.
• A thin slice of cake goes a long way…

I have mentioned before that I always baked a cake or a tart for the weekend, way back when the girls were small. I was quite good at it too…made interesting treats for the weekends…tried new recipes, concocted my own all the while having tiny hands mixing and whisking Since then, life has changed completely, like it does with years passing by. Now it is only mon chéri and me and I have become quite useless at baking..much to the distress of mon chéri! The last few weeks I tried some new recipes, tried concocting my own like old times, but being good at baking back then doesn’t apply any more…. three times I failed miserably lately.

I couldn’t get the first cake to bake through completely..however long I let it bake! After a while I gave up and removed the cake, just to cut it and find that it tasted horribly  of egg. With egg whites and beaten egg yolks with sugar and a filling of créme patissiére which is basically eggs and sugar..it turned into a  “a sweet eggish cake” and I had difficulty swallowing it. Apart from it not being a great recipe (in my humble non-expert opinion), I was also clumsy, so between all the other possibilities, I naturally messed up somewhere. But then, the recipe guided me with all those eggs…so naturally I crossed out this recipe with a “Don”t try again” -note.

The second cake was totally my own incompetence….but I will only admit that in front of a firing squad.  Just maybe I took too many shortcuts, which every decent baker knows, results in catastrophic outcomes. There is a reason why you need so much raising agent for X amount of flour. There is a reason for beating the egg whites, or creaming yolks and sugar, or adding soft butter and not melted butter. It is a science and I, who ironically enough have a science background, took shortcuts. so logically the results were exactly the same as you would find by shortcutting in a lab…nothing works and you come close to blowing up the lab…in this case, the cake. But since there was no firing squad, I blamed the recipe and crossed it off as “Terrible recipe”‘...sounds familiar right?

My third cake burnt into oblivion. Crossed off…“Horrible recipe”!

And so I arrived at the yoghurt cake for this weekend. Taken from the book Le Petit Larousse -Pattissier(it even has a pretty picture of the cake), I decided I would follow the recipe step by step, leaving no window for error.  Armed with my reading glasses, I wiped my working surface clean. I took out all my ingredients, placed them orderly in front of me.Deliberately slowing down my usual hasty pace. I placed my bowls in ranging order on the counter. I cracked my eggs in a different little bowl before adding to a bigger one, to prevent cunning egg shell pieces surprising me later.  I rubbed my hands in excitement and started off with step one of the recipe. Done. Step two. Done. Step three. Done. This is  so easy! Done. But then it started going wrong. Stupidly I added mirin instead of sunflower oil to my preparation. The bottles look very similar as do the colours! And I added the orange juice, meant for the syrup much later, to my preparation as well.  Zut! Zut! It was supposed to be easy! Only one solution.  Throw out and restart? Yes. I can’t suck at baking forever and blame the recipe! This time I attacked this recipe like I attack my tennis games. My own way.At my own natural pace, with my own shots, doing what and how I do it best. Yet, still withing the rules of the game. The science of baking. And voilà, so it came that we have a cake for this weekend, however a bit rustic and unrefined it may be and not at all like the pretty decorated and styled picture in the book…

Finally? Yes, it is truly an easy and delicious little cake and quick enough, if you get it right first time round…

Mon chéri is a happy man. And I am a proud baker. And there is still cake left, because a thin slice goes a long way.

…à bientôt…

Ronelle