Grace's French Yogurt Cake

A moist, chocolatey treat that gave me more trouble than I thought it would!

I tried to resist. I really did. But as soon as I heard that this year's Girl of the Year was going to be a baker, I pretty much knew that no matter what she looked like or what her story was, there was a very good chance she was going to be coming here to guest star on my blog. I've never been a big fan of the Girl of the Year line - I didn't get into AG because of the modern dolls, and even if the dolls themselves have been pretty, I've never really bonded with any of the characters, but since she's a baker and her books are actually pretty cute (and are a lot more believable than certain other GotY stories!), I picked her up a few weekends ago while we were in New York.

Thanks to Grace's books, I had no problem coming up with a good first recipe to feature for her. Unfortunately, mine did not turn out as perfectly or easily as Grace's did, to the point of where I'm not sure I'd use this particular recipe ever again! Read on to discover what happened.

Grace Thomas is a nine year old girl who enjoys baking. Her grandparents own the local bakery in town, and Grace has been baking - with parental supervision! - since she was little. Her first book focuses on her joining her mother on a trip to Paris to help her mother's younger sister. Grace's aunt went to France to study baking, met her future husband, and permanently moved to Paris. She's having a baby, but has been put on bed rest, and Grace and her mother are visiting to help out around the house while she's off her feet. When Grace comes home, she decides to kick off a baking business with her two best friends, and uses some of the treats she learned how to make in France as the basis for their mini company.

The first recipe she decides to make with her friends is a French yogurt cake, which is what we're going to be making today. It seemed easier than making macarons!

Apparently - and I didn't know this before doing research for this blog post - most French people don't know how to bake because they have easy access to patisseries (pastry shops) even in the tiniest of villages. This is definitely kind of different from my experience! While we don't often make from scratch cakes (or at least, we didn't until I started doing this blog), my family definitely makes desserts like pies, cakes and cookies from scratch. We buy some too, but home made (or semi home made) desserts are a frequent part of birthdays and get togethers. I'd say we make more of our own stuff than buy it, honestly!

This treat is an exception for the French. It's easy to whip together, to the point of where French children as young as three can make it themselves, and it's fast enough do to it in a hurry if you have to. It's also allegedly a very forgiving recipe, because instead of using measurements of weight or volume, you measure everything using...

A six ounce container of yogurt! Allegedly, you don't even need to fill the thing properly so long as you loosely follow the recipe.

Now, there's one thing to consider while making this recipe - most (actually all) cups of yogurt in my grocery store do not come in perfect six ounce containers. Chobani is five and a half ounces, Fage is seven, and this means you have to guestimate even more with the portions, or just use your cup as your standard for how much flour, sugar and oil you add in. This is generally a big no-no with baking. As my personal food hero Ina Garten explained in an episode of The Barefoot Contessa I caught the other day, baking is a science, and even if you double a recipe you've made a million times before, your cookies, cakes or brownies won't turn out the same way they would if you'd worked with the original recipe.

So I was a little wary going into this, and it turned out, I was right to be. The recipe I used has been adapted from the book Bringing Up Bébé and can be found on Cake Student. You start off with two six ounce containers of plain yogurt, two eggs, two container fulls of sugar, just under a container of oil, and a teaspoon of vanilla. You mix this all together, and I wound up with a very watery combination of wet ingredients.

You then add in four container fulls of flour and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder. Combine them, and then add a container of mini chocolate chips (or frozen berries, or nothing at all). Or, if you're me, you chop up some normal sized chips because it turns out we didn't have any minis in the pantry.

This then goes into a well greased nine inch loaf pan.

And in theory should come out of an oven set to 375 degrees fully baked in about forty five minutes. You can garnish with strawberries, powdered sugar, creme fraiche or just about anything you want to.

I say "in theory", because my cake had a huge part in the center that just refused to cook through, and believe me, I tried really hard to force it to. I let it cook in the oven for probably about twice as long as it needed to, and it still wouldn't solidify. The rest of the cake stayed moist, too, so the whole thing was just kind of confusing and annoying.

My current idea is that I might have added too much oil? But at the same time, I actually discarded some of the oil I'd put in my measurement container thinking that my original pour had been too aggressive, so I'm really not sure what went on here. I was pretty bummed, because the parts of the cake that were cooked through were very tasty.

Apparently, the gooey center wasn't enough to turn off members of my family from sampling the cake, and apparently, my brother really enjoyed it. I did too, but I think next time, I'm going to find a recipe that uses more precise measurements in the hopes that I wind up with a better end result. This would have been kind of weird to serve to people or bring into work with a gooey center!

Still, if you're looking for an interesting, simple recipe to try out, I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot. Just maybe find a different recipe than the one I used...

And hopefully our next venture into French baking will go a little better!