French chef shares 'simplest ever' one pot cake recipe ready in under an hour
A former Great British Bake Off star has shared the "quickest and simplest" cake recipe that is perfect to make at home
A French chef has shared a tasty cake recipe that might not only simplify baking but also spare you endless hours in the kitchen. Born in France, Manon Lagrève, a former Great British Bake Off contestant, learned to bake with guidance from her mother and grandmother.
One of her cherished recipes is for a yoghurt cake - prepped in a mere 45 minutes. She says the dessert, known as "gâteau au yaourt", serves as an exquisite base for a bounty of fruit flavours, presenting a fabulous dessert option or an afternoon treat to enjoy with friends.
She shared the recipe in her cookbook Et Voila! A Simple French Baking Love Story. In it, the mother of two claimed it's "the simplest and quickest French cake she knows". She added: "The cake is so moist and versatile, you can make it with many flavours and shapes - I use my simple Bundt tin."
Manon's French yoghurt cake recipe
Ingredients
125g pot of Greek yoghurt
Two pots of white sugar (250g)
Three eggs
One pot of olive oil
Three pots of plain flour
One teaspoon of baking powder
One pinch of salt
One teaspoon of vanilla extract
Fresh raspberries or blueberries
In a bid to make this recipe even more mess-free, Manon's recipe uses the empty yoghurt pot to measure out the same quantities worth of ingredients. She says all you have to do is measure out two pots worth of sugar, three pots of flour and one of oil to ensure they match the quantity of the yoghurt used in the cake.
Instructions
Grease a Bundt cake tin or standard-sized loaf tin with a little butter or cooking spray then dust a light coating of flour over the top.
Next, empty the yoghurt pot into a mixing bowl and fill it up twice with sugar and pour it into the bowl. Mix everything together with a whisk to form a thick cream before cracking in the eggs.
To loosen the mixture, whisk in the eggs then drizzle in the vanilla extract, pour in the oil and stir once more. For the final step, add in the dry ingredients which include the flour, salt, and baking powder and pour into the tin. You can give the batter a quick taste test and if you feel it needs more flavour, you can add a little bit more vanilla.
Cover the blueberries or raspberries in a little flour to stop them from sinking, then place them on the surface of the batter and push them in slightly.
Bake in the oven for 35 minutes at 180C, then remove and leave to cool for 10 minutes. Carefully turn the cake out onto a cake stand with the fruit-topped side facing upwards.
Sprinkle with icing sugar and top with a sprig of rosemary. Manon said: "Et voila. This is the quickest French cake in your repertoire!"
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Record
8 hours ago
- Daily Record
French chef shares 'simplest ever' one pot cake recipe ready in under an hour
A former Great British Bake Off star has shared the "quickest and simplest" cake recipe that is perfect to make at home A French chef has shared a tasty cake recipe that might not only simplify baking but also spare you endless hours in the kitchen. Born in France, Manon Lagrève, a former Great British Bake Off contestant, learned to bake with guidance from her mother and grandmother. One of her cherished recipes is for a yoghurt cake - prepped in a mere 45 minutes. She says the dessert, known as "gâteau au yaourt", serves as an exquisite base for a bounty of fruit flavours, presenting a fabulous dessert option or an afternoon treat to enjoy with friends. She shared the recipe in her cookbook Et Voila! A Simple French Baking Love Story. In it, the mother of two claimed it's "the simplest and quickest French cake she knows". She added: "The cake is so moist and versatile, you can make it with many flavours and shapes - I use my simple Bundt tin." Manon's French yoghurt cake recipe Ingredients 125g pot of Greek yoghurt Two pots of white sugar (250g) Three eggs One pot of olive oil Three pots of plain flour One teaspoon of baking powder One pinch of salt One teaspoon of vanilla extract Fresh raspberries or blueberries In a bid to make this recipe even more mess-free, Manon's recipe uses the empty yoghurt pot to measure out the same quantities worth of ingredients. She says all you have to do is measure out two pots worth of sugar, three pots of flour and one of oil to ensure they match the quantity of the yoghurt used in the cake. Instructions Grease a Bundt cake tin or standard-sized loaf tin with a little butter or cooking spray then dust a light coating of flour over the top. Next, empty the yoghurt pot into a mixing bowl and fill it up twice with sugar and pour it into the bowl. Mix everything together with a whisk to form a thick cream before cracking in the eggs. To loosen the mixture, whisk in the eggs then drizzle in the vanilla extract, pour in the oil and stir once more. For the final step, add in the dry ingredients which include the flour, salt, and baking powder and pour into the tin. You can give the batter a quick taste test and if you feel it needs more flavour, you can add a little bit more vanilla. Cover the blueberries or raspberries in a little flour to stop them from sinking, then place them on the surface of the batter and push them in slightly. Bake in the oven for 35 minutes at 180C, then remove and leave to cool for 10 minutes. Carefully turn the cake out onto a cake stand with the fruit-topped side facing upwards. Sprinkle with icing sugar and top with a sprig of rosemary. Manon said: "Et voila. This is the quickest French cake in your repertoire!"
Spectator
12 hours ago
- Spectator
Astonishing ‘lost tapes' from a piano great
These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang's 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn't dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he'd finished. Now she's been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us 'a peaceful and serene soundscape'. Then there's Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows 'the listener to drift off into bliss', and Sleep Circle, a 're-recorded version of the 2012 project Sleep' by DG's in-house snoozemeister Max Richter. But the funny thing is that over the past year I've spent more on DG products than I have for decades. Like its competitors, the company is frantically mining its back catalogue. That isn't exciting: I don't need fancy new packaging for CDs I bought in the 1990s. But there are also recordings remastered by Emil Berliner Studios, named after the man who founded Deutsche Grammophon in 1898 – and the results are stunning. EBS revisits the peaks of DG's catalogue, going back to the master tapes to recover audio information that was lost because the original sound engineers didn't have the right technology to extract it, or messed things up at the mixing desk. Although many of these new remasterings have been issued as CDs, SACDs or downloads, the cream of the crop is available only as pure analogue vinyl. Trust me: you haven't really heard Karajan's Mahler Fifth until you've invested £80 in the 'Original Source' LPs and played them with the best stylus you can afford. But now EBS has worked a digital miracle that you can hear on any streaming service. The Lost Tapes is an album of four Beethoven sonatas performed by Sviatoslav Richter in 1965, recorded for possible release but then mysteriously forgotten for nearly 60 years. They are taken from live concerts in France and Switzerland in which we hear the pianist at the top of his form in terrific sound – a frustratingly rare combination. Richter felt suffocated by microphones and you can hear a lack of spontaneity in many of his studio recordings. In contrast, some of his supreme flights of imagination are found in live concerts captured by wretched equipment. For example, his legendary 1958 Sofia performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, praised by critics for its 'staggering breadth of colour' and 'frenzied grotesquerie', sounds muffled or strident, depending on how you twiddle the knobs. In 1960 Richter made his American debut with six concerts in Carnegie Hall. Gripped by stage fright, under heavy KGB surveillance, he tore through Beethoven and Prokofiev sonatas, Schumann's Novelletten and Rachmaninov Preludes with a mixture of savagery and feathery delicacy. The end of Beethoven's Appassionata comes so close to breaking the sound barrier that you scarcely notice the finger-slips. Alas, the microphone was in the hands of a clueless stagehand – and when Sony reissued the recordings on CD they drained the colour out of the abrasive but vivid LP originals. But I was lucky enough to stumble on a version beautifully renovated by an amateur from an internet forum, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of the vast Richter discography. Thanks to years of obsessive-compulsive collecting, I can compare the four Lost Tapes Beethoven sonatas – opuses 31 no. 3, 90, 101 and 110 – with other Richter performances. The last of these, in A flat major, represents a unique milestone in the composer's journey; Antony Hopkins once suggested that the transformation of the fugue subject into ecstatic rhapsody is the moment when Beethoven – and music itself – finally severed the shackles of the classical style. A fanciful theory, perhaps, but that's how Richter plays it, the final bars exploding with joy. Is it a finer performance than the one he recorded in Moscow in the same year? No – it's almost identical, and the same is true of Op. 101 in A major, which Richter described as 'horribly difficult… even riskier than the Hammerklavier'. To quote Jed Distler's liner notes on this previously lost tape, we hear a 'bracingly effortless traversal of the Finale', in which the pianist 'untangles the knotty counterpoint with insouciant ease'. Richter was on fire in 1965, and his achievement in Moscow is every bit as jaw-dropping. The difference is the sound; in all the sonatas the pounding of Richter's left hand jolts you out of your seat and his ability to sustain a whisper at lightning speed defies belief. It's hard to think of other Richter recordings in which technique and sound quality are so gloriously matched. We're told that Emil Berliner Studios removed the tiniest pitch fluctuations and audience noises, something that wouldn't have been possible until recently and other technicians probably couldn't replicate. So, all things considered, perhaps we should be grateful that some idiot at Deutsche Grammophon left these tapes gathering dust until precisely the right moment.
Spectator
12 hours ago
- Spectator
A man's restaurant: Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand reviewed
The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station is George Gilbert Scott's masterpiece: his Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (a big dead prince under a big gold cross) has just too much sex to it. Late Victorian architecture seethes with erotica. The facetious will say imperialism was really just penetration, and there's something in that. It is now the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London – oh, the fretted imaginings of marketing departments – and, on a more conscious level, the closest you will get to the great age of rail, though spliced with plastic now. The modern station is ugly and translucent and sells face cream to tourists, and buns. But it hasn't lost its drama. This is the gateway to Europe and Derby. There is a monumental statue of lovers embracing by the platforms: it is 30ft high, and bronze. I think her skirt is from Hobbs, but I went to a girls' school. Inside is Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand, formerly the Gilbert Scott, a fine-dining restaurant (the phrase should be suppressed) in the French style (Garvey's grandmother was Charles de Gaulle's cook). The hotel's interiors – bloody Catholic neo-Gothic – are familiar from a bewildering panorama of films, which I should like to see welded together, and here: Richard III, The Secret Garden, Batman Begins. But sumptuousness does not intrude into the dining room; rather, the drama stops. It's a lovely room, tall and curved, and they have broken it. Neo-Gothicis camp itself: too much is not enough, as sang the Kids from Fame. Blood will have blood. This is decorated with creams and browns, possibly because men – this is a man's restaurant – think bright colours are feminine, to which I say: meet William Morris. Someone has installed Art Deco lighting. I know worse things happened to the Midland Grand when it was a British Rail office, but still. We are on a vast table on a small stage. It feels like Posh and Becks's wedding. The staff are young, charming and very literal. They stick to the script. And that is French haute cuisine, skilled to the point of agonised. There is a menu gourmandise for £179 and a menu experience for £139. (Wine pairings are £99 to £219.) We eat à la carte, because tasting menus are torture. Even so, we are brought, unasked, a dish of tomato stripped, remade and laid with flowers. I know Garvey is a brilliant chef. I can feel his childhood strivings. Faced with them at dinner, I just wish he'd try less hard. Whatever he performs on his tomato – and he does every-thing you can conceive of, and somethings you can't – it is already perfect. He is tilting at tomato phantoms. We eat Devon rock crab with sweet pea and seaweed vinegar, shrouded with foam (£28); a jumbo quail with girolles, broken apart and reconstituted as if by a tiny murderous Borrower (£32); tortellini with morel (£29). If it is all intense – this food needs Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor to accompany it – the only real failure is the tortellini. It appears under a slick of foam so thick I think I am driving in fog. You clear the foam as if seeking an airway: food as a scream for resuscitation. The warm bread, though, is perfect. All gifted chefs do this. It is a taunt. Still, the clients – tables of financiers, you can tell from the haircuts – seem happy. On the wall is a cracked mirror. If they look hard enough – and they won't – they will see Garvey's ideal version of themselves. Sign up for the Lunchtime Espresso newsletter Sign up
