I planned way ahead for Tuesdays with Dorie this week and bought all of my ingredients in advance to make sure that I would be able to bake up this delicious French Yogurt Cake selected by Liliana of My Cookbook Addiction (recipe can be found on her blog) . And then I played the waiting game. You see, it has been humid, humid, humid here and when it is not humid... it's raining- in short: horrible baking weather. Then all of a sudden it was a rainy Monday afternoon and I still had not baked up my little TWD treat. So I baked it. In the rain. And this is what happened when I tried to pop it out of the pan:
Yep, the whole bottom remained in the pan. But don't worry! I scraped it out and put it back in place and pretended that the whole thing never happened.
And then it looked like this:
Ok, so back to the actual cake. Dorie explains that this is a mainstay for French home bakers (in fact she says that it's one of the only things the French bake- and why would they with those amazing patisseries on every corner?!). It's similar to a pound cake- but without butter. The fat comes from a half cup of oil and a half cup of yogurt. I actually ended up using low-fat vanilla yogurt (gotta cut the fat where I can!) and it worked very well. Dorie gives the option of using a half a cup ground almonds in place of some of the flour, which I did, and it gave the cake a nice hearty, nutty texture.
Although you could do pretty much anything in the world with this cake, I decided to make Dorie's lemon curd. I have never used her recipe for it and I was really pleased with the results. It was very, very tart which is exactly how I like my curd! I was pretty worried about how thin it looked when I put it in the fridge last night, but this morning it had thickened perfectly and really complemented the faint flavor of lemon zest in the cake.
Because the cake is not overly sweet and because Helen Mae had a really horrible time sleeping last night (note very puffy eyes and mussed hair) I decided that I could feed it to my child for breakfast and not feel like a horribly indulgent parent:
