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This recipe comes from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking, one of four picks from the first installation of our Climate Cookbooks column.
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RECIPE: What’s-in-Your-Fridge Citrus Cake
- Yield: Makes 1 cake 1x
Description
This is one of the easiest cakes out there (dump, stir, pour, bake) and oh-so-very flexible. When I first sent this recipe to my friends, we all went on a frenzy of citrus cake-baking from North Carolina to Rhode Island to the Alpine village of Klosters, Switzerland. Over the weekend, we churned out about a dozen variations (and not because I made them do it, but because the cake is that good, I swear). Everyone made their own version based on the citrus and dairy in their home at that moment, from lemon-yogurt to orange-ricotta to grapefruit-crème fraîche, and raves flew in from all locations. Whether you need to use up citrus, clear out some dairy products, or just bake a beautifully simple cake, this is the one for you.
Ingredients
- 1 3/4 cups flour
- 1 cup brown sugar or white sugar
- 2 tsps baking powder
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 3/4 cup sour cream, plain whole-milk yogurt, ricotta, or a similarly thick dairy combination
- 3 eggs
- 1/2 cup oil (neutral oil if you don’t want it to stand out, coconut oil for flavor)
- 1/4 cup citrus juice
- 1 Tbsp grated citrus zest (about 2 lemons or 1 grapefruit)
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch round cake pan or loaf pan.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the dairy, eggs, oil, juice, and zest. Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until everything is just combined and no floury bits remain (lumps are fine, though).
- Pour the batter in the prepared pan and bake until a tester or fork poked into the cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes for a cake pan, 50 to 60 minutes for a loaf pan.
- Let the cake cool for 10 minutes or so, then run a knife around the edges to help release the cake before removing it from the pan. Glaze or soak the cake if desired (see note) and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days — if it lasts that long.
Notes
Got extra juice? If you have a bit of extra juice to use up, combine it with a small amount of sugar to soak the cake or a large amount of sugar to glaze the top. To soak the cake, heat 1/4 cup of the juice with 1 tablespoon of sugar until the sugar dissolves, then pour over the cake while still warm. To glaze the cake, whisk 2 to 3 tablespoons of the juice with 1 cup of powdered sugar and drizzle over the cake once cool.
Excerpted from the book Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright © 2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
