Yogurt in cakes?

[NotQuiteCockney]

What does this do? I made a pear cake with yogurt in it yesterday, and it came out very well indeed. But I'm just wondering, is the yogurt a humectant? Or what?

my mum made fab cake with yoghurt...always very moist and tasty..never too dry and crumbly..don;t know why! but it is good , no?

I'll have to try more yogurt in cake recipes ...

what's a humectant

i think the yogurt talks to the gluten content

Humectant is something that keeps it humid. Applesauce does this, so does grated courgette, or carrot, or crushed pineapple.

Oh, this is the recipe I followed. Made two loaf cakes, rather than a bunch of muffins, and didn't have any wholemeal flour so had to use all white. Came out very well, anyway.

(humid = wet/moist. Just to be clear)

I have a similar recipie for muffins that uses yoghurt as well. Not sure why it works but they taste good to me!

recipe even !

NQC- i always bung in a few dollops of yogurt into muffins cakes ect if it says buttermilk or sourcream i just use yogurt genrally for cakes or muffins that have fruit and oats in ect or if it looks a bit thick i losen with yogurt!

NQC- i always bung in a few dollops of yogurt into muffins cakes ect if it says buttermilk or sourcream i just use yogurt genrally for cakes or muffins that have fruit and oats in ect or if it looks a bit thick i losen with yogurt!

Hmm, that makes sense. I tend to ignore recipes that call for buttermilk, as I don't generally have it in the house (who does? Well, Americans, it's pretty standard stuff there ...).

I use it in muffins - it does seem to make them quite moist, like bought muffins. Yummy .

My muffins don't keep well though so I freeze any I don't want to use that day (not many usually!) and take out in small batches.

AFAIK the acidity of the yoghurt reacts well with the baking soda that is in baking powder/self raising flour.

Ah, that makes sense - the cakes did rise a lot more than my cakes normally do.

if you really need butter milk half a lemon squeezed into half pint of milk and left to stand will produce buttermilk

Um, that's how you make sour milk, not buttermilk. Buttermilk is cultured, like yogurt, so you need a starter (i.e. you need buttermilk to make buttermilk).

well not according to all my cook books!!

Hmm, the web says otherwise . Soured milk is a fake buttermilk .

yes i suppose you are correct but whats wrong with a bit of Fake now and again at least it is healthy fake and not crap fake like fruit shoots and milkybar buttons!!

Oh yes, nothing harmful in using soured milk in place of buttermilk.

I'm touchy about buttermilk because I actually like to drink the stuff (it's readily available in Canada), and I'm certainly not about to start drinking soured milk instead!

[foolish Brit hat on]

and to think I always thought that buttermilk was the thin 'ultraskimmed' type stuff that was left over from making butter... am now better informed!

MrsB, I haven't checked my McGee on this, but I think that's what buttermilk used to be. I think it was possibly cultured because all butter was? Now it's a normal cultured dairy product, at least in the places you can get it.

(must confess have got most of my buttermilk info from, um, historical novels, so I can see how I got that idea)

Ok, I looked it up, yeah, it used to be the skim milk left over from butter being made, but often with little bits of butter floating in it. Now it's cultured skim milk.