gateau au yaourt

One of my favorite food blogs is chocolate & zucchini. Food blogger Clotilde lives in Paris, and as a result, I’ve learned a lot about French foods and customs. Last week she had a recipe for Gateau au Yaourt, or yogurt cake. Apparently it is a very basic and well used recipe throughout France, so I figured, when in California, do as the French do (or something like that). The neat thing about the recipe is you use the yogurt container to measure out the remaining ingredients!
I began with this modest container of yogurt:
yogurt.JPG
Which then was miraculously transformed into this:
yogurt cake.JPG
Click on the photo to see the crumb (it’s a dense and chewy cake).


Clotilde put ground almonds and berries in hers, but I made a decidedly plain version.
Gateau au Yaourt
——————–
– 1 tub of plain yogurt (125 ml)
Use the tub to measure out the following:
– 2 tubs brown sugar
– 1/2 tub oil
– 3 tubs flour (Clotilde says to sift, but I am lazy)
Plus:
– 3 eggs
– 2 tsp baking powder
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour a 9″ cake pan.
Combine the yogurt, oil, and sugar in a big bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time. Add the flour and the baking powder in about three additions. Stir until just blended. The batter will be pretty thick (mine was, anyway). Dump into the cake pan and bake for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean (the top should be kind of springy when you touch it). Let cool in pan for 10 minutes then turn out onto a rack and cool completely.
You can frost the cake or not. I chose to put a powdered sugar glazing on it. I just took some melted butter (1 tablespoon), added a cup of powdered sugar and a couple tablespoonfuls of milk and stirred. I added a bit of vanilla extract as well.
Recipe adapted from chocolate & zucchini.

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21 Responses to gateau au yaourt

  1. jackie says:

    That’s looks so easy and yummy! Thanks for that. Considering all the French food I’ve been eating, I’m destined to make this.

  2. alison says:

    Mmm, that looks yummy! Wondrous yogurt, a chameleon of foods.

  3. Anke says:

    I wonder what it tastes like with soy yoghurt…since I’m experimenting with it for some time now (frozen soy yoghurt!) I moght just try this next.

  4. kerrie says:

    Yum, that looks good. I may have to try it at the weekend, Brooke and I have fallen into the habit of making a different dessert every Sunday!

  5. froggy says:

    I will have to try that! Looks yummy.

  6. claudia says:

    Why do I read you before breakfast? Why??

  7. mimi says:

    how totally funny…I MADE THAT CAKE ON SUNDAY! (a friend of mine gave me the url cuz she knows chocolate and zucchini are my two favorite foods.)
    i also noticed the cake was the consistency of a quick bread, rather than a cake. i’m wondering…what was the size of your yogurt container? i did conversions on line after i made the cake, and realized that mine had been twice as large as the 125 ml recommended. this means that i should’ve used twice the eggs, right? so i’m wondering if it would be more “cake-like” if i’d done that… which is why i’m asking this question…did you use a 125ml tub of yogurt?

  8. mimi says:

    it was BEYOND DELICIOUS just the same!

  9. Em says:

    I love the French.

  10. Katherine says:

    There’s an ad for Maizina corn starch on French television that shows two versions of the cake — one, made by the mother, is very dense, the other, made by the daughter, is lighter, has risen higher, is probably fluffier.
    Apparantly the secret is to replace half the flour in the recipe with Maizina. I’ve never tried it, because I like the dense version, myself…

  11. Sharlyn says:

    Here’s what I want to know: Where do you put all of that food?! You bake and bake and bake but where does it go?!

  12. Meg says:

    No wonder it’s so good – it’s got almost as much sugar as anything else! My best bud’s on a diet – no sugar or yeast. Can you imagine? It works for her, but tough to figure out what to eat. Esp. for a bread & sugar lover like me.

  13. kitty says:

    MAriko, did you use ‘American’ brown sugar or demerrara brown sugar (the ‘natural’ sugar that is brownish in color)? Thanks 🙂
    ps spoke briefly with Meghan b4 her surgery – any word on how it went?

  14. lucy says:

    Hey, that looks like my favorite Trader Joe’s Greek Yogurt :o). I’m going to have to try that cake, but here’s another yogurt recipe I have often for breakfast: equal amounts yogurt and applesauce, a squeeze of honey and a generous sprinkling of granola (the maple/pecan granola from TJ’s is yummy!), stir it up and it’s like creamy apple pie.
    Okay, now I’m hungry.

  15. Sharlene says:

    Ooh, that’s my favorite yogurt, and my fridge is full of it at the moment! Might have to give this cake a try for the holiday weekend.

  16. Lisa says:

    This was great! I used 1/2 cup instead because I don’t have any 125 ml containers. I’m thinking of trying it again with less oil and more yogurt.

  17. Melissa says:

    Not a day goes by when I don’t each yogurt (same for chocolate!). One of my all time favorite cooking-with-yogurt recipes is a muffin recipe from Cooks Illustrated.
    Thanks for the heads up about the NPR story. I will check the archives. My hub is much more up on these issues than I am.

  18. eileen says:

    I made this cake over the weekend as well, and while I used a regular US 6oz yogurt container (I just measured it 3/4 full, proportionally, and it worked fine), I did do the conversion and discover that you should actually use a 4oz container. That’s the size of each cup in a sixpack of yogurt, so all is not lost! I like the yobaby vanilla, and would use that next time.

  19. susan in pa says:

    Oh, YUM!!!! I love that Total Greek yogurt too! Must try this cake. Thx for blogging about it!

  20. Mira says:

    Okay, this is just sick. Now not only do I have an enormous list of knitting blogs to read (leaving less and less time for actual knitting)…I now have been introduced to a food blog that is so darn interesting that I have to start collecting those too! Now I’ll never bake again either, I’ll be to doggone busy reading!
    Hmmmp! But thanks anyway.

  21. jessica says:

    I also read her blog and was wondering how that cake tasted… was it delicious?!

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