Lawrence.com

A while back I was doing “the big shop” at Walmart, toddler in tow, in preparation for a party we were hosting. It didn’t go so well. Johnny was cranky and wanted out of there. I had groceries, diapers, after-Christmas sale items and a kitchen sink in my basket. My cart overfloweth. (Yes, I bought a bunch of crap at Walmart. Shaddup.)

In the process of checking out, the checker dropped and broke a bottle of red wine vinegar. That smelled great. Some chaos ensued in the scramble to clean it up, finish checking out my gargantuan order, and find a way to shove it all back in the cart and save room for the child. So, I wasn’t paying really great attention to the details of my bags, as you can imagine.

When I got home I had a couple of items in my possession that I was sure weren’t mine. Don’t ask me whose they were or if I paid for them or someone else did, but it irritated me to no end. What was I going to do, for example, with a quart of fat-free plain yogurt? Plain yogurt? It’s not something I have a lot of use for. And fat-free? Blech.

Still, I wasn’t going to make the effort to dig the receipt out of the trash or take the stuff back to Walmart, so there it sat in my refrigerator, taunting me, laughing at me, making a mockery of my limited refrigerator space. I needed to find a use for it, if for no other reason than to get it out of my sight.

We had some friends over for dinner on Saturday night and I decided I should have a little dessert at the ready, on the off chance that someone might want a sweet at the end of the meal. We usually prefer to polish off our meals with an extra glass of wine and skip the dessert, but hey, I had the time and, well, I had some yogurt to use.

I looked around for dessert recipes that included plain yogurt and they all looked a little “meh,” until I found some people discussing the merits of a thing called yogurt cake. It looked like pound cake to me, but it didn’t require nine sticks of butter like most pound cakes do, so I figured I’d try my hand. You guys, it was amazing. Like, even my staunch hates-dessert-unless-it’s-brownies husband liked it and commented on its moistness.

I kind of combined several recipes according to what ingredients I had on hand and what appealed to my taste preferences. I had a lot of clementines that were on their last legs and I really wanted to use them up, so I went with those instead of the lemons most of the yogurt cake recipes called for, and wow, that was a good choice. I also had a few strawberries in the refrigerator that were about to be past their prime, so I decided to make a little strawberry syrup topping. I figured if it failed all I was out was some yogurt I didn’t buy (that is how I choose to remember it) anyway, and some clementines that were about to die in the bowl. It was a low-risk project.

Clementine Yogurt Cake with Macerated Strawberry Syrup

1 1/2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup plain non-fat yogurt

3/4 cup + 1/3 cup sugar, divided

3 eggs

3 teaspoons orange or clementine zest

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup freshly squeezed clementine or orange juice

For the glaze:

1 cup confectioners’ sugar

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

For the syrup:

3/4 cup sugar

6 large strawberries

1/3 cup water

1 teaspoon lemon juice or clementine juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in one bowl and the eggs, sugar, zest, vanilla and yogurt in another. Whisk the wet ingredients together and then slowly add the flour mixture in, stirring constantly. Then fold in the vegetable oil and pour the batter into a greased and floured loaf pan. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour, or until a toothpick comes out mostly clean. It’s okay to underbake this a little, by the way. Meanwhile, cook the remaining 1/3 cup sugar and the 1/3 cup of clementine juice in a small saucepan over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved.

Cut the strawberries into small pieces and stir them in with the water, sugar and lemon juice, Bring to a rolling boil and stir occasionally for five minutes, then turn the heat down to medium low and let the mixture continue to cook and reduce until it becomes syrupy, stirring occasionally, about 20 minutes. Then use a potato masher to smash the strawberries into smaller pieces, if necessary.

When the cake is done, remove it from the oven and let it stand for a few minutes. Then pour the sugar/citrus mixture over it. When it’s cooled, turn it upside down onto a platter. Full disclosure: my cake poofed up and wasn’t flat, and also got rather dark on top, so I used a serrated knife to cut it down so it would lay flat on the platter and to remove the dark crust.

Then mix up your confectioner’s sugar glaze and pour it over. Serve in slices and pour the strawberry syrup over the top.

yogurt cake by meganstuke

It’s a pretty cake and easy to do. You could use whatever fruit or citrus you have laying around or pour chocolate or whipped cream on top. And even though most of us at dinner were not dessert-y types, that cake is miraculously almost gone, so you tell me.