Provençal Style Yoghurt Cake with Olive Oil and Quince

Provencal olive oil and yoghurt cake

Provençal Style Yoghurt Cake

Following on from yesterday’s France et Moi interview with Alice Alech here is the recipe she has kindly shared from An Olive Oil Tour of France, for a Provencal style yoghurt cake made with olive oil and quince. This cake is a simple French classic. A cake that is often the first thing that French children learn to bake because they do not need to be able to read any scale to make it because the “pot” used to measure the ingredients is the first yogurt pot, emptied, rinsed and dried. It also helps with the confusion between grams, oz and cups!

Recipe

1 quince

2 pots of plain yogurt

1 pot of sugar

2 pots of flour

2 pots of ground almonds

1 pot of olive oil

4 eggs

A 15g sachet of levure chimique (baking powder)

1 lemon zest

Method

Core the quince then place in a saucepan with a spoonful of sugar and cover with water. Bring to the boil, cook uncovered until tender.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

In a large mixing bowl whisk eggs and sugar until quite pale.

Stir in the yogurt, olive oil and lemon zest until all the ingredients are fully incorporated.

Add the flour, baking powder and almonds and combine.

Grease a baking tin and pour in the batter. I used one with a hole in the middle purely as my oven cooks cakes better this way.

Arrange the quince on top.

Bake for about 45 minutes checking the centre of the cake with a fork to make sure that the cake is cooked.

Leave for 10 minutes or so before removing from the cake tin.

Our quince blossom this week

Olive Oil

Thank you Alice, this recipe is likely to become a favourite here as it is moist and delicious, plus we make our own yoghurt and grow our own quinces (if only we had a productive lemon tree too). This week I made it without fresh quince, but instead added some cooked rhubarb. However as our two quince trees are heavy with blossom at the moment I am looking forward to using them later in the year and I may even get Ed interested enough in what goes on in my kitchen to give it a go too.

More recipes and information on French olive oil can be found in Alice’s book An Olive Oil Tour of France, available on Amazon. You can read my review of it here and my interview with Alice here.