Ina Garten-Inspired Lemon Cake With Yogurt
Lemon cakes that taste faintly of lemon usually had the zest stirred into the batter with everything else. There is a better place to put it.
Rub the zest into the sugar with your fingertips until the sugar looks damp and smells overwhelmingly of lemon. The sugar crystals act as an abrasive and rupture the oil cells in the zest, releasing the oils where fat and sugar can carry them through the whole cake. Zest folded into a finished batter stays locked in the peel.
It takes thirty seconds and roughly doubles the lemon flavour. Your hands will smell of it for an hour.
Jump to the recipe ↓Ina Garten-Inspired Lemon Cake With Yogurt
Serves 10 · Baking
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 50 min
- Total
- 1 hr 30 min
Involved7 steps, 10 ingredients, a technique that commonly fails
Ingredients
- 3 lemons, zest and juice
- 250 g caster sugar, plus 50 g for the syrup
- 250 g plain flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 200 g full-fat Greek yogurt
- 3 eggs
- 120 ml vegetable oil
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 120 g icing sugar, for the glaze
Method
- Heat the oven to 175°C (155°C fan). Line a 23 x 13 cm loaf tin.
- Rub the zest into the 250 g of sugar with your fingertips until it is damp and fragrant.
- Whisk in the yogurt, eggs, oil and vanilla.
- Fold in the flour, baking powder and salt. Stop as soon as it comes together.
- Bake , until a skewer comes out clean.45–50 minutes
- Warm the 50 g sugar with 60 ml lemon juice until dissolved. Spoon it over the cake while both are hot, a little at a time.
- Cool completely, then glaze with icing sugar mixed with 2 tbsp lemon juice.
Yogurt is here for the acid, not the dairy
Full-fat yogurt reacts with the raising agents and tenderises the crumb by interfering with gluten development. It also keeps the cake moist for days, which a butter-and-milk cake will not do. Low-fat yogurt has more water and gives a looser, wetter crumb.
Syrup while the cake is hot, glaze only when it is cold
Hot cake drinks syrup; cool cake lets it run off and pool. The glaze is the opposite — brush it onto a warm cake and it dissolves into a sticky film rather than setting opaque. Two different jobs, two different temperatures.
Zest before you juice
An obvious point that everyone learns the hard way once: zesting a squeezed lemon half is close to impossible. Take the zest off all three lemons first, then cut them.
Storing
Four days, wrapped, at room temperature — the yogurt and oil keep it moist far longer than a butter cake. It freezes well unglazed for three months.
Questions people ask
Why rub the zest into the sugar?
The crystals break open the oil cells in the peel. That oil is where the flavour is, and it needs to be released before it can spread through the batter.
Can I use low-fat yogurt?
It works but the crumb is wetter and less tender. Full-fat Greek yogurt is worth the difference here.
Why oil rather than butter?
Oil stays liquid at room temperature, so the cake still eats as moist on day three. Butter tastes better on day one and firmer after that.
Can I bake it as a round cake?
Yes — a 20 cm round tin, and start checking at 35 minutes.
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