We have had very little access to dairy products in the past few weeks. We have only one container of butter, which we acquired 3 weeks ago, prior to lock down. So recipes with little or no butter have become a necessity. Luckily, we were gifted some yogurt and curd by a neighbour. This recipe basically uses yogurt as a substitute for much of the butter needed. Although, there’s a significant amount of yogurt in this, you don’t taste it. It just gives the cake a wonderful moistness and and a really tender crumb.
I've used homegrown organic lime in this recipe. The fruit bears a lot of similarity to Calamansi Lime, as the flesh is a lovely orange when ripe and is extremely juicy and tart. Just a small amount of the zest imparts so much flavour and the lime leaves too have a wonderful fresh fragrance and taste. So the amount of lime needed may change according to the lime you have on hand.
Since it's just the four of us at home, we made a pretty small 6 inch cake, just enough for 4-6 greedy slices.
Ingredients :
- 25g Butter
- 25ml Refined Coconut Oil
- 100g Yogurt
- 100g Sugar
- 2 Eggs
- 100g Self Raising Flour
- 1/4tsp Baking powder
- Zest of a Lime
- Juice of a cheek of Lime
Preheat the oven to 180C and line a 6 inch baking tin with grease proof paper.
In a bowl, cream room temperature butter and the oil. We used coconut oil as it was the only oil we had on hand. You can use any flavourless oil you have, or use 50g of butter.
Add yogurt, sugar and the eggs, one at a time, and whisk until light and fluffy. Stir in finely grated lime zest and lime juice. To make it extra tangy you can add more lime juice.
Sift flour and baking powder and gently fold it into the wet ingredients.
Pour the cake batter in to your cake tin. We placed 3 lime leaves at the base of the tin, on the baking paper, and then poured in the cake batter. The lime leaves lend a lovely citrusy perfume and flavour to the cake, not to mention they look really pretty as well. If you are using lime leaves, just remember to remove them before serving as they tend to be slightly bitter when overcooked like this.
Bake the cake for 25- 30 minutes in a preheated oven until a skewer comes out clean.
Too reinforce the citrus notes in the cake, we added a very scant amount of lime drizzle on top. (Miss Podi Hands wasn't too crazy about the tartness of the drizzle, so we used very little. After eating the cake, turns out she loves it. We mixed a table spoon of lime juice with a couple spoons of icing sugar and drizzled it on top while the cake was still warm - just for that extra sweet and citrusy kick. To make it extra special, we decorated the cake with fresh flowers, lime leaves and limes from our garden.
