Raspberry yoghurt cake

Thursday night is work-baking night; that is, when I generally bake something to take to work to celebrate Friday, being the end of our working week. Lately, I have been receiving a few hints for something a little more friendly on the waistline than my usual treats; after all, we work in an office, and unless we make the effort to go to the gym or get some other form of exercise, sitting in a chair all day is not exactly conducive to burning off calories.

With this in mind, I decided to make raspberry yoghurt cake from page 320 of The Australian Women's Weekly 501 Low-Fat Recipes. If made in accordance with the recipe, this cake has 6.5g of fat and 192 calories per serve. I reduced the fat count a little further by substituting the cream cheese frosting suggested in the recipe for lemon icing. Lemon and raspberries are a terrific flavour combination, and I am not a huge fan of cream cheese frosting, so I see this modification as an improvement. Here is what the cake looks like once completed:

Uniced

Iced

This cake is easy to make. The biggest hitch is when you are turning the cake out of the pan to cool, because the fruit content makes it little more fragile than most cakes. My recommendations to avoid the cake cracking or breaking are to be particularly gentle when turning out the cake, and to make sure that you line the pan with baking paper as suggested by the recipe before pouring in the batter so that the fruit doesn't stick to the pan. I found that I needed less than the 1 hour and 5 minutes cooking time stated in the recipe, obviously due to the idiosyncrasies of my oven.

So that I could taste-test the cake for this blog, I baked one dessert spoonful of batter separately in a patty cake tin. My verdict on this cake is - scrumptious! The fruit and yoghurt combined to make the cake moist and flavoursome, and the fact that it is relatively low in fat and calories (for a cake!) is a bonus. I would definitely make this cake again. Here's hoping that the troops like it too!