Orange Yoghurt Cake

Now, it's been a while since the sistah introducted me to smitten kitchen, and I have been DYING for a chance to try out some of her stuff, especially the non chocolate desserts. It being the gramma's eighty-sixth, I decided to make her lemon cake. But there aren't enough lemons around, and deffy not nice ones. It is also orange season, and we have these that I think are clementines, but we call them khinu. So I decided to tweak it a bit. And add cream cheese frosting. Which didn't really work out too well cos I wanted it more like a glaze and it wasn't, and I suck at icing cakes so it took a gorgeous looking cake and made it look lame. But. The flavours went wonderfully. Still, I want to make this one plain some day. My soaking syrup wasn't very syrupy, but the ohh the moistness! I was also making it in a tearing hurry so I didn't have time to document the process. Next time!

For the cake:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup whole milk plain yoghurt (I used nestle's lite dahi and it was fine)
• 1 cup sugar (I used about 3/4, because the oranges were very sweet, but later realised it would have been fine)
  
• 3 extra-large eggs (no sizes here in da thoid woild, so I just went with ones that looked large)
• 1/2 cup grated orange zest (It was 4 khinus)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence (I almost didn't put this in but lordy it made such a difference)
• 1/2 cup sunflower oil (any vegetable oil would do I imagine)

For soaking syrup:

• 1/2 cup juice (sadly this only uses 2 of the 4 oranges)
• 1/2 tbs sugar

For the frosting:

• 4 oz cream cheese (1/2 tub Philadelphia low fat in this case)
• 1 tbs unsalted butter (Amul salted in this case)
• 1 cup powdered sugar (ended up being a titch less than one cup)

To make cake:

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together. I don't have a sieve, so I mixed with fingers, and I don't think any injury happened. In a large bowl beat eggs a bit. Add sugar, beat some more. Add zest, essence, oil and yoghurt. Whizz away. If you, like me, have broken your electric mixer while trying to make pavlola, then use whisk and hope it turns out ok. Which it did.

Slowly fold in the dry stuff. Whippity whip with the whisk. Transfer to greased baking device. I used enormous bundt pan, which was eventually only half-filled. Bake at 160C for 50 minutes.

While it's baking, take some time to sit right there in the kitchen and breathe, because by god this is the most drool-inducing smell I have ever had emerge from anything. I'm drooling just remembering it. If possible open all the doors so it gets all over your house.

When the cake is done, remove, wait ten minutes and extract from pan to soak in syrup. I had to go somewhere so I ended up doing all this a good hour and a half late, but aside for some coaxing to get it out of the pan, nothing bad happened.

To make syrup:

In a saucepan heat the juice and sugar stirring lightly till it thickens. Pour over cake. One could poke holes or use a pastry brush (if one owns such a thing), but I found it absorbed most of it painlessly. Some puddled in the middle, but that's what I get for using a bundt pan.

To make frosting:

Beat em all up together till smooth. Again, if bereft of electric mixer and you don't have time to wait for butter to soften, nuke for 20 seconds and then whip.*

Spread over cake and refrigerate.

Devour.

*Tasting this frosting is what made me resolve to bake a cheesecake, cos while the last one was yum (patience recipe will go up), this was just such an indescribably intoxicating taste.