LEMON - POPPY SEED OLIVE OIL CAKE

Let me tell you something other than food first. Ian Vaava took his first few unassisted steps and walked towards me last week! Ever since, he's been trying to reach his attention grabbing places on his own. Sometimes,I catch him running along the couch just barely touching it with his tiny fingers! I don't think he knows what he is doing but I am super duper excited! So is Jobin.

Now the cake. This is one of the prettiest,unadorned cakes that I've baked. I mean, just look at it. Look how marvelously speckled it is. Black dots against the lemony yellow! I found it so hard not to stare at my fat slice before eating it.

It is so beautiful,slice after slice.


This cake is super easy to make. Mainly because it's a one-bowl recipe and it does not need an electric mixer. All it needs is a wooden spoon/whisk to whip up this wonderful speckled lemony cake batter. The recipe is super simple to fix and it hardly takes any time.Then there's a twist to Melissa's recipe. It doesn't call for butter,instead, extra virgin olive oil. I was excited to try this recipe,mostly because of the olive oil part.

I wanted to know if the taste of olive oil would be strong,so I tasted some of the batter just to have an idea. It was very faint,I mean if someone else made the cake batter and asked me to taste it, I would have never guessed there was olive oil in it. On that note, let me tell you, I am an olive oil lover. I love dipping my bread into it. If you think you are not going to like it's taste, you can substitute it with another oil, like vegetable or canola. But, I really think you will like this cake as is. Try it, you will like it for sure!

LEMON - POPPY SEED OLIVE OIL CAKE
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
Zest of 2 lemons
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons plus 4 teaspoon lemon juice
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar

Method: Preheat the oven to 350 F /180C. Grease and flour an 8- inch loaf tin.
In a medium bowl, rub together sugar and lemon zest until they resemble wet sand. Whisk in the buttermilk, 3 tablespoon lemon juice and the eggs. Whisk the dry ingredients into the batter followed by the poppy seeds and olive oil .Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour or until done.
As soon as the cake is warm to touch, invert it onto a cooling rack. Turn cake right side up.
Whisk together 4 teaspoon lemon juice and 1/2 cup confectioners sugar and brush it over the top and sides of the cake. Let it cool completely before slicing.

This cake, truly is wonderful. If you cannot find poppy seeds,omit them and bake. I can assure you the taste would remain the same. We adored this speckled cake,so did our friends whom we shared it with. Ian Vaava was waiting for me to finish photographing the cake so that he could dig into it. I am so happy that he enjoys whatever we give him!

MY LEMON YOGURT CAKE

Ibaked my very own cake,for the first time! When I say that, I mean, I didn't use anybody's recipe but my own proportions to bring it all together.Don't ask me how I got till there...it was a long bumpy ride on a very dull Thursday. Fortunately the end result was mind blowing that being sad the whole day didn't matter after all! All the thoughts, worries and confusions yielded in an awesome sauce lemony cake!
OK. I have to tell you that long story and I am not going to cut it short :-)

Last Thursday was quite eventful at home, on the lines of baking. I tried my hand at baking a piped cookie whose dough was just not pipe-able so I rolled them into small balls and baked it. It came out just OK and not so good as the recipe stated. It was a butter cookie and there was a lot of butter in it. I cannot waste butter even if I have to waste the rest of the ingredients. Yeah! I'm like that.

So after a so-so butter cookie, I thought I'll do something to get me going.It's been days since I've been longing to eat a lemon flavoured cake. The hunt was on for a good recipe but seriously, I couldn't get one. During our many e-mails throughout the day, Jobin mentioned he was going for out with his colleagues after work and will be late to get back home. I got that email right after that stupid cookie and when all my search for the perfect lemon cake came to a full stop.

I whined. I wrote back saying 'I'm sad.I want to eat a nice plain lemon cake.I cannot find any recipe.Tried baking a cookie. Flop aayi. Sad.' I mean, seriously...when there are so many food blogs and recipe websites, how is it that I cannot find one recipe which sounded good to me??? Most of them had some sort of a topping going over the hot cake and I didn't want that extra sugar going into our bodies, if I could help it. So I thought I'll compromise and start on with Amma's recipe for her famous cake. That was the beginning...just the beginning of everything!

I took out my brand new digital weighing scale that I was sent for a review and started off measuring butter and sugar. I dumped them into my Reddie to do it's work. Then I moved onto measuring the flour and I painstakingly realised that I was short on it! The butter and sugar was busy creaming up and I don't have enough flour! Ok, let's move onto Plan B...I shall make do with some wheat flour then. Hmph! Ok, now grab the eggs...and for some strange reason, I knew there were not  many eggs left in the fridge. Sadly,it was true.I looked back at my Reddie and couldn't even think of dumping that butter!

Seriously, that was not my day! I am usually very careful and pull out all the ingredients before I start baking and I have no clue what was going on with me that day! I was so let down that I couldn't get a simple cookie right and finally this cake too? Like I said before, the end result changed everything! :-)

RIA'S LEMON YOGURT CAKE
My own recipe

Ingredients:
180g unsalted butter, softened
240g sugar
3 whole eggs plus 1 egg yolk
Zest & ( 3 tbsp ) juice of  1 lime or lemon
200g maida/all purpose flour
40g whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
5 tbsp yogurt

Method: Pre-heat the oven to 180 C/ 350 F. Line a 9 inch baking tin.
In a bowl, whisk together flours, salt, baking powder & baking soda.In another large bowl, beat together butter and sugar till creamy,for 2 mins. Add the eggs one by one and beat for 30 secs after each addition. Add the lime juice and zest and beat for 30 secs. The mixture will curdle but it doesn't matter. Add the flour mix and beat to incorporate. Add the yogurt and beat on high for a minute or two. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 1 hour 10 mins. Your oven timings maybe different, so keep checking from 45 mins.

*Updated on 26/4/2020 - Over the years I revised the method for making the cake batter. Add all the ingredients into a bowl and beat it on high speed using a hand mixer for 2 minutes.

• My current oven bakes the cake in 45 minutes.
• You can use 4 whole eggs instead.
• You can use 240 grams of maida/ all purpose flour instead.
• My 1 cup flour measures 120 grams and 1 cup sugar 200 grams. 

I always dreamt about creating my own cake recipes and never did I even dream that it would be through an accident, a very careless accident! I've actually had a successful accident a while ago and it grabbed me 1st place at a competition too! So, no complaints with accidents! ;-) Don't worry, this cake wouldn't stick to the bottom of your pan as you saw in a photograph above, I was just piling up the crumbs into the tin after I got the cake out of it.

This cake was so so soft that I feared it would crumble in my hands when I unmoulded it. The lemon taste was spot on and the cake was so buttery & incredibly moist! I am so proud of myself ! :-) It really is a wonderful delicious lemon yogurt cake!