I recently entered a competition with a major online Parenting website. You had to invent a recipe using a particular brand of yogurt that was recently on special at Woollies and submit the pictures and recipe as you would a blog post and you could be selected to be their food blogger extraordinaire. Paid 3 months for a couple of posts and all the Rachel’s yoghurt you could eat. I’m guessing. Anyway, as I haven’t announced my resignation from the public service and you haven’t seen me carrying on like a Yoghurt makers marketing free ride, I didn’t win. If you go check out the 5 finalists, you’ll also see that I didn’t quite fit the profile for the winning entry – young, fit, pretty and skinny (albeit the token cuddly stay at home dad is there). I guess a motherly fat chick, with regrowth almost the same length of a full head o hair, wasn’t really what their marketing team were after to sell low fat yoghurt. Cynical? Nah. It’s probably best that I didn’t win the comp, I don’t know how I could’ve kept the swearing out of all the paid posts and the Happy Hippy Shit, in.

Anyhoo, here is my non-winning recipe for the chocolate yoghurt cakes I made for Mother’s Day. Sit back and enjoy the yoghurty schmooze fest 🙂

Who doesn’t love taking something ordinary, like a chocolate cupcake and a little leftover tub of your fav yoghurt and turning it into something fanbloodytastic? I’ve made this chocolate yoghurt cake before, as big cakes, using Greek yoghurt but wanted something small and dainty for my Mother’s Day high tea. Small they were, dainty they weren’t. Tasty as all get out.

Necessity is the mother of all invention, and I had everything bar the Greek yoghurt, but I did have a tub of Rachel’s Wild Strawberry and Rhubarb yoghurt, courtesy of hubby and his love for yoghurt and a bargain. Chocolate yoghurt cupcakes we would have.

Ingredients

125g Butter
120ml veggie oil
200ml water
3Tb cocoa powder
300g plain flour
300g brown sugar (you could substitute for castor sugar if you wish)
pinch of salt
1tsp bi carbonate of soda
2 eggs at room temp
200ml Rachel’s Wild Strawberry and Rhubarb yoghurt

In a saucepan, melt together butter, oil, water and cocoa powder. Once melted, take off the heat to cool down.

In a large bowl, sift together all the dry ingredients, I use a balloon whisk to ensure there are no lumps.

Pour over the wet mixture, and stir well, until combined, but don’t overmix. Add eggs and yogurt, and stir well again.

Pour into lined cupcake papers, I pour the batter into a jug for easier pouring, less mess.

Bake at 180 deg C for 30 minutes or until a skewer comes out with a little crumb stuck to it. The cakes should be moist, a bit like a mudcake, just not as dense.

You could ice these, but I just sprinkled icing sugar over the top. Then served them with cream, fresh berries macerated in sugar, mini meringues and ice cream. It was Mother’s Day after all!