Recipe | Yoghurt cupcakes

One bowl. No scales. No mess. And delicious results!

You can use any flavour yoghurt (or yogurt, depending on how you prefer to spell it) for this recipe. I used strawberry because it’s what I had in the fridge. Large pots of fromage frais also work with this recipe.

This is a reworking of a recipe I previously featured as a loaf cake.

Ingredients (makes 12 cupcakes)

1 pot of yoghurt – a single pot of yoghurt is usually around 100 g (3.5 oz) but as long as you use the pot as the measure for the other ingredients it doesn’t matter if it’s slightly more or less than this weight (say 85 g or 125 g) because you’ll still get 12 cupcakes out of the ingredients.
3 pots of self-raising flour
2 pots of caster sugar
1 pot of vegetable/sunflower oil
2 eggs
2 tsps baking powder (don’t heap the spoon. Again, flat spoonfuls is what you need)

Method

Put twelve cupcake cases into a cupcake tray. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C (160 fan)/ 350 degrees F/ Gas Mark 4.

Empty the yoghurt out of the pot into a large bowl. Wash and dry the empty pot thoroughly.

Use the empty pot to measure the sugar, then the flour and finally the oil into the bowl. I poured the dry ingredients into the bowl through a sieve to avoid any lumps.

When measuring out the dry ingredients, make sure to fill the yoghurt pot only until the flour or sugar is flush with the rim. Here’s a picture of the pot filled with sugar to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. You can also see the lumps of sugar I wanted to sieve out!

Add the eggs and the baking powder and mix all the ingredients together until you have a smooth cake batter.

Divide the mixture into your twelve cupcake cases.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown. You can use a sharp knife or a skewer to check the yoghurt cupcakes are done by inserting the point into the middle of one of the cupcakes. If the point comes out clean your yoghurt cupcakes are done and you can take them out of the oven.

To prevent the middle of the cupcakes collapsing (which has happened to be when making loaf-shaped yoghurt cake), I turned the oven off after 25 minutes, opened the door slightly and left the cupcakes in there for another half hour until I could pick up the tray without oven gloves.

Leave the cakes to cool completely on a wire rack.

I chose to decorate my strawberry yoghurt cupcakes with some simple water icing (icing sugar + water) and sugar stars. But you could decorate them with cream cheese frosting or buttercream if you prefer.