If there’s a family in Italy that doesn’t have a recipe for yogurt pot cake, then I’ve yet to meet them. And I love this plain cake with perhaps disproportionate intensity. There is something so quintessentially Italian about its scent — as it bakes, I think I’m in a kitchen in Italy — and its taste — that combination of lemon and vanilla — and even the old-fashioned charm of its method. This is it: your yogurt pot is your unit of measurement. And even though I saw from the original recipe that I copied down (from some scrawled piece of paper in the kitchen of a house I’d rented one summer), that the specified yogurt pot had a 125ml capacity, I have kept the same number of eggs for my 150ml yogurt pot. I work on the principle that eggs these days are larger than when the cake first came into being. Anyway, it works, and that’s the main thing. And this is the way it works: for 1 cake, you need 1 pot of yogurt, 2 pots of sugar, 1 pot of oil, 1 pot of potato starch or cornflour and 2 pots of flour. In keeping with this style of measuring, you will see that I have even stipulated 2 capfuls of vanilla extract. For US cup measures, use the toggle at the top of the ingredients list.
