Life with Bees

What to do when you’re laid low and can’t eat a thing? Make a cake.

A couple of weeks ago I fell victim to a passing Canberra bug and was forced to remain in isolation, foodless and friendless. The nadir of illness, to me, is that moment in the middle of the night when you can no longer sleep it off and can only lie there, aching and woolly-headed, wishing you were dead. But the next worst thing is the hunger and thirst. Not the hunger that means a slow reawakening of health – ooh, I could totally eat a whole bowl of soup and golden buttery bread. Just the crappy one where you desperately want cool lemonade, or fried chicken, or 37 rum balls but can’t swallow anything. I had that hunger.

A cake I couldn't eat seemed a happy medium.

TK had made a big tub of butter chicken for us just as I fell ill (and heroically managed to eat all of it over the course of a week). To make the marinade for the chicken, he’d bought a bucket of yoghurt the size of my head. The yoghurt needed using up and Ina Garten came to the rescue with a Youtube video.

Perhaps it was as much  Garten’s soothing, motherly style as her soft lemon yoghurt cake. The recipe was easy enough even for me to follow – whisk the wet ingredients with sugar, grate the soul of a lemon in tiny curls into the bowl, whirl in the sifted flours and powders. The only odd moment was that you add half a cup of vegetable oil into the mix dead last. There were a couple of minutes when the cake refused to dry out in the oven but it just meant a rustic deep brown edge to each slice. It’s a moist cake, sunny but softened by yoghurt. Garten adds a lemon and sugar glaze over the top but I preferred it plain.