How To Make Yogurt Pound Cake

This is the second thing I’m making with the yogurt I got from Stonyfield Farms. I can’t say how this will compare to what you’ll get using other yogurt, because my wife, who eats yogurt plain — I only use it as an ingredient in recipes — assures me it’s way better than any other yogurt she’s tried. She says it’s got the distinctive yogurty tang, but it tastes more like melted ice cream than like other yogurts.

Anyway, this isn’t technically a pound cake, though the texture is really similar. But it’s much tastier, and it melts in the mouth much more than other pound cakes.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 heaping cup of vanilla whole milk yogurt
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla (or use plain yogurt and double the vanilla)
zest of 2 lemons
½ cup olive pomace oil

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman. I tweaked the ingredients just slightly.

Directions

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt and whisk to combine.

Using a microplane grater, zest two whole lemons. (One if it’s bigger than a baseball.) You want to get all of the yellow, but stop when you get down into the white part, which is not sour, but bitter.

You may have noticed that’s not a microplane grater there, but is in fact a plain old — or should I say very old — grater. If you’d like to correct that problem, you can go to my wishlist and send me one. That would be cool. (UPDATE: Well, someone sent it. Very cool. Thanks!)

Okay, back to cooking. To the zest, add the sugar, eggs, vanilla, oil and yogurt and mix thoroughly. Don’t beat on high speed, you’re not trying to whip the eggs up, just get it all mixed together.

Pour the wet ingredients over the dry, and mix just enough to get all the dry ingredients moist. If you beat this, you will develop the gluten in the flour, making the cake chewy.

Pour the mix into a greased and floured loaf pan (follow that link for directions) and bake at 350° for 45 minutes.

When the top has split, and a toothpick stuck in the top comes out clean, remove it and let it cool until you can handle the pan.

Go around the edge with a knife to make sure it didn’t stick anywhere, then flip it over and rap gently on the bottom until the loaf pops out.

Flip it over onto your serving plate.

And that’s it.

Come back soon to see the raspberry glaze I put on this. Yumm.