Look it Up Cake

I have a fridge full of still-good-but-getting-kind-of-old food, so I decided to make a cake.  I have a recipe for orange blueberry cake that I haven't made for some time, and thought I'd give it a go.  The only problem was, my scale is metric and the recipe was in imperial.

I don't know how much 1 oz of cream cheese is, so I had to look up the conversion of oz to gram and weighed it.  Then I didn't believe how little 1 oz is (I though it'd be at least half a block) so I added some more.

The next step is to add eggs then alternating yogurt and the flour mixture.  Again... no idea how much 8 oz of yogurt is.  I'd forgotten the earlier conversion was, so I looked that up again.    Then I couldn't multiply 28.34 by eight in my head, so I went back to the computer to figure that out.

I measured that out, and then I'll be darned if I could find the baking powder.  I know I've got some; but it's nowhere to be found.  So I looked up how to make it myself and did that.  (It turns out, making baking powder is incredibly easy, and since the homemade version contains no aluminum, I suspect that I'll be doing this from now on.)  See below for instructions

Then, if you could believe it, I realized that when I copied out this recipe a few years ago, I'd forgotten to write down how much baking soda to use.  I had to look up other cake recipes to make a guess at that too.

My last problem was with my nifty new citrus juicer.  Since I tend to use fresh lemon or lime juice at least a few times a week, I splurged a while back for a really great juicer that strains the juice as you go, and measures it when you're done.  Except, it measures in ml instead of cups, and I needed a 1/4 cup.  I had to look that up too.

Finally, I had all my ingredients measured out and ready to go.  The cake's done now, and is looking and smelling great.  The only problem is, I realized after all that prep work that the yogurt I was using contained Splenda.  I'm not eating Splenda anymore because it doesn't sit right with me.

I guess that means that I'll be bringing it into the office tomorrow, but first I'll have to find a guinea pig to try the first piece.  After all that guess work, I'm not so sure it'll turn out.



Orange Blueberry Cake
AKA, in my case, Lemon Blueberry Cake because I didn't have oranges or orange yogurt

2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup softened butter
1 oz (28.34 grams) of softened cream cheese
4 eggs
3 cups of flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda (an educated guess)
8oz (226.8 gram) orange yogurt -I used lemon yogurt
1/4 cup orange juice - I used lemon juice
2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries.

• Preheat oven to 325F
• Grease and flour bundt pan, set aside
• Combine sugar, butter and cream cheese, beat 3 minutes until well blended
• Add eggs, one at a time
• In separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda.  Gradually add flour mixture to butter mixture alternately with yogurt.  Being and end with flour mixture.
• Stir in orange (lemon) juice and vanilla
• fold in blueberries (if you're using frozen blueberries, they should still be frozen when you mix them in, or your cake will turn purple).
• pour into prepared pan.  back for 65-75 minutes

When the cake was out of the pan but still warm, I drizzled it with a glaze that I'd made of 2 part white sugar, 1 part fresh lemon juice.  (One lemon makes about 1/2 a cup of glaze)

Homemade baking powder

1 part baking soda

1 part corn starch

2 parts cream of tartar