Mini cakes, the name alone makes you feel less guilty for eating all of them two. Right?

Please tell me you have you had the chance to browse May’s issue of bon appétit magazine? And by chance did your eyes fall upon the recipe on page 30? Three words: French.yogurt.CAKE!

Here’s what I did, I took the loaf recipe and made only a few modifications and threw in some fresh strawberries and turned it into eight mini cakes.

As I skimmed the recipe I happened to notice that the recipe required NO mixer, NO butter and NO CALORIES… ha! simply kidding on the calorie part, but it does call for Greek yogurt and I simply love that!

To Make These Strawberry Lemon Mini Yogurt Cakes Gather:

unbleached all-purpose flour
baking powder
kosher salt
granulated sugar
grated lemon zest
plain whole milk greek yogurt
grapeseed oil or extra light olive oil
eggs
pure vanilla extract
strawberries
kitchen-made whipped cream – for serving

Well today’s weather has been weird, for lack of a better descriptive word. It would go from sunny to dark and cloudy in the matter of moments which made it difficult to shoot this post. But a little cloudy sky never stopped me before and neither did a tasty cake… wait yes it has. Stopped me from exercising!

Star by whisking 1 and 1/2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt. Set off to the side for a moment.

In a large bowl add in 1 cup of sugar along with the zest of 1 lemon, which is roughly 1 tablespoon.

This is the fun part; with your fingers rub the sugar and the zest together until the sugar resembles wet sand.

Add in 2 eggs and 3/4 of a cup of whole milk Greek yogurt.

To that, pour in 1/2 cup grapeseed oil. The original recipe calls for vegetable oil, but since I never have any, I substituted grapeseed oil instead.

Mix together.

Don’t be like me and almost forget the vanilla. Why does this always happen to me??

Measure and add in 1/2 teaspoon and add that in too.

Next, add in the dry ingredients.

Then gently stir or fold them into the wet ingredients.

Then add the strawberries into the cake batter.

Next, gently fold the strawberries in until they are evenly throughout the batter.

I found these fancy-schmancy liners at a Home Goods store for 6 bucks. They are sturdy enough that you don’t need a muffin pan what-so-ever. You’ll need 8 of these babies, but jumbo muffin liners would work too, only set them up on a rimmed baking sheet and you’re good to go.

Then fill the liners up half way full, smooth out the tops and pop them into a preheated 350° oven for 20-22 minutes, or until the tops are a light golden and when you insert a cake tester it comes back clean. When you’re using these kinds of liners you have to be careful not to over bake the cakes.

Next, after they’ve bake; carefully remove them off of the sheet pan and over to a cooling rack, wait patiently for them to cool completely. IT’S SO HARD!

And there you have it. Your quite own mini cake. Lemony cake studded with fresh strawberries topped with kitchen-made whipped cream… does it get any better than this? I didn’t think so. Cake is what Fridays are made for, seriously. Google it.