yoghurt cake with lemon and poppy seeds

Now here’s a cake for those of you who don’t have weighing scales or a mixer in your kitchen. All the measuring is done with yoghurt pots and spoons; the mixing is done with a hand whisk.

I’d been thinking about making yoghurt cake for about a week now. Then, earlier this week, Deb of smitten kitchen posted a recipe for lemon yoghurt anything cake, a kind of lemon drizzle cake with blueberries that had my mouth watering. I particularly liked Deb’s suggestion of replacing the blueberries with poppy seeds, and so there you have it: yoghurt cake with lemon and poppy seeds.

Deb’s recipe is adapted to use 125g yoghurt pots instead of cups; in itself a variation of Ina Garten’s recipe for lemon pound cake. If I make this again, I’ll put in more sugar because this version seemed more like loaf than cake!

 

For the cake:
3 pots plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 pots plain yoghurt
2 pots caster sugar
3 eggs
zest of 2 lemons
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
almost 1 pot vegetable oil — take out 1 tbsp
1/2 pot poppy seeds

For the drizzle:
1/2 pot lemon juice
1 tbsp caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180˚C. Grease a 1lb loaf tin. Line the bottom of the tin with greaseproof paper.

In a bowl, sift the flour, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, whisk the yoghurt, sugar, eggs, lemon zest, vanilla and oil. Gradually whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Mix in the poppy seeds. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin.

Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour until the centre of cake springs back when you press it with your finger.

Heat the lemon juice and sugar until all the sugar is dissolved. Allow to cool.

Cool the cake in the tin for 10 minutes. Remove from the tin and brush the lemon syrup over the cake and allow to soak in.