Looking to lose some fat or just after a tangy cake? Check out this Yogurt pound cake that needs so little to be perfectly made!

Yogurt cake is a simple pound cake where some part of the butter is substituted with yogurt. It’s more common to use sour cream which generally contains more fat than yogurt, -especially if we use crème fraiche- but the end result is earie similar, moister cake with tangy flavor.

Pound cakes were created to be easy to remember recipes from an era where people just couldn’t carry around the vastness of all human knowledge in their pockets but most of them couldn’t even read, let alone write up recipes.

Original pound cakes contained one pound of each of their ingredients. Butter, sugar, eggs, and flour was all used in equal quantities, requiring no tools for measurement nor brainpower to keep them around was required.

Apparently, they were enormous desserts filled with little more than processed carbs and saturated fats, but the cake wasn’t marketed to singles nor anyone had to care about staying lean or survive past 60. It’s true, they most likely didn’t sit all day long in front of a screen nor started their day with a dessert.

Fun fact that dessert is French invention that was served after the table was cleared. The word “desservir” simply means “to clear the table” which was stuck to the thing served after. Interestingly, African and Asian nations didn’t find it necessary to add extra calories to their meals unnecessarily hence if they had any sweet during the day, it was kept between meals.

Nowadays, there is great deviation from the original recipe not least because of the advent of chemical leaveners that were not used back in the 1700s and they solely relied on the eggs.

Thanks to the advance of technology, we can shed a couple of pounds from here and there and still create a beautiful looking, yet tasty cake and maintain our waistline even if we don’t work the fields from day in and day out.

Luckily, pound cakes are quite forgiving with ingredients and their ratio, given we don’t mind if our cake looks and tastes a bit different each time, we throw it together. If we are more into producing consistent results though, taking notes of the exact weight of ingredients will help us create cakes without surprises.

Adding yogurts to our cakes will allow us to reduce the amount of butter required to coat the gluten and will result in a moist, crumbly treat. Less butter means less calories which can be a great relief when it comes to hoping for a tasty bite after our meals.

When using acidic ingredients such as yogurt in cakes, we can rely on its help to leaven the cake with the addition of baking soda only, just like it’s the case with buttermilk cakes. Mind that, baking powder alone may not work in way as it was intended since baking powder was designed to work in a fairly neutral environment and with yogurt, we’ve been changing that to acidic.

Adding sweetener is something unmissable when talking about dessert and since pound cakes fall heavily into that category, we need to pour something in there. If we have quit sugar for a while, we may be satisfied with as much as two tablespoons of honey or sweetener of choice for the whole cake while those, who yet can’t imagine life without sugar, will need probably as much sugar as the amount of flour used for the cake.

Ingredients

3 medium / 150g Eggs
½ cup / 100g Oil or melted butter
2 tablespoon / 30g Honey or sweetener of choice
½ teaspoon / 3g Salt
1 teaspoon / 5ml Vanilla
1 teaspoon / 6g Baking soda
1½ cup / 200g Flour
1 cup / 250ml Yogurt

Kitchen utensils

8½” x 3″ / 22cm x 7.5cm Loaf pan

How to make Yogurt cake?

In a large bowl, beat eggs until light yellow and fluffy. Beat in cooking oil or melted butter, honey or sweetener of choice, salt, vanilla and baking soda.
Mix in the flour. Some like to do it in batches but with an electric mixer ,we can dump all the flour we like, the machine will do the hard work of mixing everything together in no time.
The last crucial step is, to mix the yogurt in. Keep this to the last minute otherwise the acid will neutralize the baking soda which will result in flat dense loaf. The order for adding yogurt and baking soda can be swapped.
Quickly pour the batter into a baking form.
Place the yogurt cake into the middle rack of a 360°F / 180°C preheated oven until the top turns golden brown which should happen when a kitchen thermometer registers 210°F / 99°C, about 40 minutes.

Enjoy!

Star this recipe!

Yogurt Cake Recipe

Looking to lose some fat or just after a tangy cake? Check out this Yogurt pound cake that needs so little to be perfectly made!

Course Dessert

Cuisine French, Sugar free recipe

Prep Time 10

Cook Time 30

Equipment

8½" x 3" / 22cm x 7.5cm Loaf pan

Ingredients

Instructions

n a large bowl, beat eggs until light yellow and fluffy. Beat in cooking oil or melted butter, honey or sweetener of choice, salt, vanilla and baking soda.
Mix in the flour. Some like to do it in batches but with an electric mixer ,we can dump all the flour we like, the machine will do the hard work of mixing everything together in no time.
The last crucial step is, to mix the yogurt in. Keep this to the last minute otherwise the acid will neutralize the baking soda which will result in flat dense loaf. The order for adding yogurt and baking soda can be swapped.
Quickly pour the batter into a baking form.
Place the yogurt cake into the middle rack of a 360°F / 180°C preheated oven until the top turns golden brown which should happen when a kitchen thermometer registers 210°F / 99°C, about 40 minutes.