Yoghurt pot cake: the perfect sugary blank canvas

I’m pretty easygoing when it comes to most aspects of cooking. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from being dogmatic or dictatorial. It’s just supper, at the end of the day. There are, as they say, many ways to skin a rabbit. And cooking is supposed to be about joy; it’s not an exam.

But the exception is measuring ingredients for baking. Oh boy, do I get on my high horse about this. I can be very boring indeed about the need to measure accurately. The American system of cups and tablespoons drives me mad. Cups are inexact and inaccurate, they rely on scooping and sweeping, they don’t account for the varying density of dry ingredients. Scales, I will declaim – with only the slightest impetus – are inexpensive and an essential piece of kitchen equipment. You simply cannot bake properly without them! You need weight not volume, for goodness’ sake! Baking might not be rocket science, but it is science.

My mind, however, has been changed by a single yoghurt pot. Well, a yoghurt pot and its associated cake. A yoghurt pot cake is a simple cake, in appearance, flavour and conception. It relies on measuring each ingredient by the number of yoghurt pots needed: 1 pot of yoghurt, 2 pots of sugar, 3 of flour etc. This means that the exact size of the yoghurt pot doesn’t matter because, once it is emptied and washed out, the ratio of the other ingredients remains the same. It’s a pleasingly efficient system and one that, despite the aforementioned variabilities of measuring, always seems to work perfectly. How do I reconcile this with my vehement rejection of volume measuring in baking? I don’t. I contain multitudes.