Possibly the easiest, no-mess recipe I know. You can use any flavour yoghurt you like – I used strawberry this time.

A note on spelling. The most-common spelling of the word in Britain is apparently still “yoghurt”. I cling to thing to this spelling, even though it seems “yogurt” is slowly taking over!

Ingredients

• 1 carton of yoghurt – use this yoghurt pot as your measure for the other ingredients
• 3 cartons of self-raising flour – fill the yoghurt pot until the flour comes flush to the top, don’t overfill
• 2 cartons of caster sugar
• 1 carton of vegetable/sunflower oil
• 2 eggs
• 1.5 tsps baking powder

Method

It’s not for nothing I say this is the most straightforward recipe I know. I will type out here what I have written in my recipe book. I’ve added some extra notes in brackets.

• Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix together well.
• Pour the mixture into a greased baking tin/s (I used a loaf tin).
• Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees C (160 fan)/350 degrees F/ Gas Mark 4 until golden brown (you need to check on the cake from about 20 minutes onwards. As important as colour is the wobble. If the cake is still very wobbly when moved, it’s not cooked enough. You can always use the sharp knife/skewer trick – insert it into the cake and if it comes out clean the cake is done).
• Leave the yoghurt cake to cool in the tin.

Decoration

Every single time I’ve made this cake it’s had a dip in the middle as you can see here:

I’m sure the chemists/advanced bakers out there can explain why this is. I say: why worry about it when you can make it a feature? So I waited until the cake had cooled and filled the dip with melted marshmallows (just put them in the microwave but go slowly! Give them short blasts of heat, stirring between blasts). With the gap filled, the cake looked like this:

Then I got to use up some pink buttercream icing which I had in the freezer (raspberry flavour). If you need the recipe you can find it with my recipe for my raspberry ripple sponge cake. I filled a piping bag with the buttercream and used a star tip to pipe small stars all over the top of the cake. Like this:

And then I added a few sugar decorations!

Right. Time for another slice. With a nice cup of tea 🙂

And remember, you can see a list of all the recipes on my blog by visiting my recipe index.

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Claire Huston / Art and Soul