Recipe: Easy Orange Yogurt Cake and Growing Strawberries

A simple, classic orange cake that tastes great with strawberries (recipe here).

One of the nice things about living in a very sparsely populated rural area is that when the first local strawberries of the season arrive at the only store in town, the owner is likely to personally call and give you a heads up because he remembers that you bought something like 20 quarts of strawberries last year and are a sucker for rarely available local fruit.

"One of the Amish down the road just brought in 40 quarts of strawberries that he picked this morning and needs to sell today because he can't sell on Sundays. Do you want some?" When he said they were grown by one of the two brothers who built our new sheep barn and hay barn a few years ago, and who I know gardens organically, I was sold.

More story below. . .

Recipe for a Quick and Healthy, Berry Good Breakfast

A Strawberry Peanut Butter Wrap!

Tuesday Farm Photos: Amish Neighbors and an Easy Orange Cake for Strawberry Season

Don't you just love this wagon?

Several Amish families moved to this area two years ago, and in my opinion we're all the luckier for it. All of our new Amish neighbors that I've met have been very friendly, and they've already brought much to our rural community.

There are three basket makers and a furniture maker (who we might have build us a bed for the new living quarters). A couple of Amish women sell homemade baked goods on the square in town.

Two brothers who live on adjacent farms about 10 miles down the road (and across the street from the donkey peddling cowboy) built us a gorgeous new sheep barn last fall to replace the one that was falling down, and a giant new haybarn in April to replace the one that was really falling down (pictures coming of both new buildings one of these days, I swear). The wonderful rough cut siding on the sheep barn (which you can see here) came from the Amish sawmill down the road.

More below . .

Monday Farm Photo: Highlight of the Holiday Weekend

Lemon Coconut Quick Bread with Garden Strawberries & Freshly Whipped Cream

Previous strawberry posts:
6/4/05: Strawberries
5/21/06:A Beautiful Breakfast!
5/27/06: The Turtles vs. Me, Cary, and Bear
10/28/07: Growing Strawberries & Preparing Your Bed for Winter
5/28/08: Successfully Growing Strawberries!
6/20/08: Strawberries & An Easy Orange Yogurt Loaf Cake
5/24/09: Sweet Strawberries & A Curious Cat

More fruit recipes on Farmgirl Fare:
Really Raspberry Tartlets
Blueberry Breakfast Bars
Just Peachy Blueberry Breakfast Bars
My Best Bran Muffins: Blueberry Banana, Cranberry Orange, and More
100% Whole Grain Ginger Pear Bran Muffins
Mexican Monkey Cake with Chocolate, Cinnamon, and Banana
Cranberry Christmas Scones (scrumptious any time of year)
Spicy Pumpkin Pecan Raisin Muffins
Yip Yap Whole Wheat Banana Snaps with Raisins and Chocolate Chips

© Copyright 2009 FarmgirlFare.com, the everything's-always-better-with-whipped-cream foodie farm blog where we realize the weekend isn't over yet, but are pretty sure that nothing will top this sweet treat (which we actually enjoyed three mornings in a row)—and we couldn't be more grateful to have two Jersey cows living a few miles down the road who provide enough milk and beautiful pale yellow cream for a few lucky neighbors as well as their owners. If you don't have any fresh strawberries handy, this Lemon Coconut Quick Bread is also quite tasty slathered with strawberry jam.

Sunday Dose of Cute: Sweet Strawberries & A Curious Cat

Topaz Inspects My Freshly Picked Breakfast

Just getting to know our Tough Tortie Topaz (aka 3T)?
1/21/08: How Topaz, Sarah Kate, and Mr. Midnight Came into Our Lives
1/29/08: Farmyard Kitty
6/20/08: Meet Our New Hay Inspector
8/18/08: Tractor Cat
9/4/08: Even Kitty Cats Need to Eat Their Greens

© Copyright 2009 FarmgirlFare.com, the juicy red foodie farm blog where we're just glad that farm cats don't like homegrown strawberries as much as the turtles do.

An Easy Orange Yogurt Loaf Cake Recipe in the Kitchen and Strawberries in the Garden

A simple, not overly sweet orange loaf cake that tastes great with strawberries and stays moist for several days.

Last year I filled one of the 4' x 8' raised beds in my kitchen garden with 30 Cavendish strawberry plants, and after diligently snipping off every blossom and runner that appeared during the summer (because no berries the first year means bigger and healthier plants the next), nestling the plants under a protective bed of hay in fall, dreaming of glistening strawberries throughout the winter, and happily monitoring the flourishing plants come spring, I was finally rewarded with a juicy and jewel-like harvest that began the end of May.

I savored the first strawberries of the season while standing in the garden, and it doesn't get much better than that—unless you happen to have a nice orange yogurt cake, some freshly whipped cream, or a scoop of French vanilla ice cream (or all three!) handy.

A slice of this moist, not overly sweet cake is delicious by itself, but it goes particularly well with strawberries, and it also tastes divine with blueberries.

Sadly, most strawberries today don't even taste like strawberries. They've been manipulated and modified to look big and pretty and travel well, with flavor barely a consideration.

In order to find a good strawberry you must look to your own or a generous friend's garden, a small U-Pick farm, or a farmers' market. And organically grown is a must.

Commercially grown strawberries are #2 on the Environmental Working Groups list of most contaminated produce (apples are #1), and years ago I read that in one laboratory test a single commercially cultivated strawberry was found to contain residue from 22 different toxic chemicals. That's so sad it doesn't even seem possible.

Oranges are #31 on EWG's list, and since the skin of citrus fruits often contains lots of toxic chemical residues, it's best to seek out organic fruits when using the zest in recipes.

Freshly picked strawberries with a side of homemade cake for breakfast.

Susan's Easy Orange Yogurt Cake
Makes one 9"x5" or 10"x5" loaf — inspired by this recipe on Pinch My Salt

**Click here to print this recipe**

This is the kind of simple recipe I love to have in my collection. It mixes up quickly, can be eaten plain or gussied up, and stays moist for several days. Like most baked goods it also freezes beautifully—and can be easily sliced when frozen. It tastes even better the second day.

One of the nicest things about cake recipes is that there are basically an endless number of them; change one or two things and you'll often end up with an entirely different dessert. You could certainly make a lemon version of this, and I'm thinking about a combination of lemon and lime, or maybe even lemon, lime, and orange. A Meyer lemon yogurt cake would probably be delightful.

As always, I urge you to seek out local and organic ingredients; they really do make a difference.

Good baking pans make all the difference. I love my Chicago Metallic 10-inch commercial loaf pans and my heavy gauge 9"x5" USA Pan. Both pans are also great for baking sandwich breads, such as my popular Farmhouse White.

3/4 cup (1½ sticks/6 ounces) organic butter, softened
1¼ cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup organic orange juice
2 Tablespoons finely chopped or grated organic orange zest (I use a vegetable peeler & a sharp knife)
2 cups organic all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder (make sure it's fresh!)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Optional syrup:
1/3 cup organic orange juice (strained if freshly squeezed)
1/4 cup granulated sugar

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large bowl and use an electric mixer (I use a hand held mixer) to cream until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes.

3. Add the eggs, vanilla, yogurt, orange juice, and orange zest and beat 1 minute.

4. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and mix well.

5. Pour the batter into a greased and floured 9"x5" or 10"x5" loaf pan and bake for 55 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Ovens vary, so start checking for doneness after about 45 minutes. Let the cake cool on a wire rack for 10 to 15 minutes and then carefully remove it from the pan.

6. If desired, combine the orange juice and sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves, then spoon or brush it over the cake. Slice and serve, preferably the next day if you can wait that long, plain or piled high with fresh strawberries and whipped cream and/or ice cream. This cake will keep at room temperature for 3 days or can be frozen.

Related Strawberry Posts:
Growing and Enjoying Strawberries
5/21/06: A Beautiful Breakfast!
5/27/06: The Turtles vs. Me, Cary, and Bear
10/28/07: Growing Strawberries & Preparing Your Bed for Winter
Garden Journal 5/28/08: Successfully Growing Strawberries!

More Farmgirl Fare cake and quick bread recipes:
100% Whole Wheat Coconut Zucchini Bread
Heavenly Lemon Coconut Quick Bread
Lemon Rosemary Zucchini Bread
Quick Chocolate Emergency Loaf Cake

Still hungry? You'll find links to all my sweet & savory Less Fuss, More Flavor recipes in the Farmgirl Fare Recipe Index. Enjoy!

© FarmgirlFare.com, the sweet and juicy foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares recipes, stories, & photos from her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres—and every freshly picked berry is a cause for celebration (and cake).

Farm Photo: 6/23/07

Looking For My Strawberries?

There won't be any strawberries in the garden this year. After several years and many pounds of gorgeous, sweet bounty, my original plot finally petered out. And the raised bed I filled two years ago with locally grown Super Strawberry plants from the Garden Club's plant sale is history, too.

I do have 27 new Cavendish strawberry plants flourishing in another 4' x 8' raised bed, but one of the secrets to growing strawberries is that you need to pinch off all the blossoms that appear the first year. This allows the plant to expend more energy on itself rather than on making fruit for you. It's not easy, but in the long run it's worth it. I think.

You might think that there isn't a bright side to having a strawberryless garden, but you would be wrong. No strawberries for me also means no strawberries for all the ravaging, ravenous turtles. It's turtle season in the garden again, and for once I couldn't care less.

*insert evil laugh here*

Wondering if I've completely lost it? You can read more about the ongoing battle for my berries--and local turtles in general--here:
--6/4/05: Strawberries (one of my very first blog posts)
--5/6/06: Spotted In The Backyard
--5/12/06: Damn Turtles!
--5/21/06: The Turtles Didn't Get Them All
--5/27/06: Beaten To My Berries
--6/15/06: At Least The Mulberries Should Be Out Of Turtle Reach
--6/25/06: Weekend Baby Turtle Blogging?

© 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where Farmgirl Susan shares photos & stories of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.

Strawberries

Ripe & Ready To Pick

There is nothing like a strawberry. No one ever bites into something and says, "This tastes like a strawberry," unless it is a strawberry. But sadly, most strawberries today do not even taste like strawberries. As with so many other foods, they have been manipulated and modified so much that they only look pretty and travel well. Flavor is barely a consideration. I saw some strawberries for sale at a megamarket the other day that were literally so gigantic they just looked weird. And I bet they probably were tasteless.

Perhaps it is because of this lack of flavor that strawberries are often subjected to needless abuse in the kitchen. Even I once made a baked strawberry pie, complete with instant tapioca. I now realize this was a mean thing to do. A good strawberry should never be cooked. The exception, of course, is strawberry jam (which I adore), but I cringe each time I read a recipe that calls for more sugar than berries. Instead, try simply mashing a few very ripe strawberries with a fork and spreading them on a slice of toast or a warm scone. If you do decide to try your hand at making jam, be sure to include some underripe berries, as they are full of pectin and will help the jam to thicken.

One of my cookbooks claims that the strawberry is "America's favorite berry," and I think that everyone must have at least one vivid strawberry memory. Joe has reminisced more than once to me about the time, years ago, he and a friend accidentally walked into a formal, private party at a Miami yacht club. Despite being sunburned, windblown, and severely underdressed, he managed to procure a glass of champagne and pounce upon an enormous bowl of perfect strawberries without being noticed.

My most vivid strawberry memory is of strawberry pancakes, which our family must have eaten on dozens of weekend mornings during my childhood. They were very thin French pancakes (I suppose that technically they were probably crepes) liberally doused with melted butter, sprinkled with powdered sugar, covered with halved, just-picked strawberries from the backyard, and then sprinkled with yet more powdered sugar. They were not stacked, but were arranged neatly in a circle over a large dinner plate--thus ensuring maximum butter and sugar coverage. The pancake batter was mixed in the blender, and the recipe was so simple even my little brother was an expert at making them. They were cooked on a rectangular electric griddle, six at a time, and you knew exactly how much batter to pour out for each pancake because the griddle was clearly marked from years of using it for nothing but those pancakes.

The powdered sugar came out of an ingenious contraption I had completely forgotten about until today. It was a tall, white plastic thing with a small, airtight lid and was a combination storage container and server. I think it was Tupperware. You turned a little crank and perfectly sifted powdered sugar snowed out of the bottom and onto your plate. Because these pancakes were so thin, even a small person could eat a dozen of them in a sitting. When it wasn't strawberry season, we ate them with just the melted butter and powdered sugar--never with maple syrup.

Sliced strawberries served over really good French vanilla ice cream is a wonderful thing. And while I would not pass up a homemade strawberry shortcake if somebody handed me one, lately I have found myself becoming more and more of a purist when it comes to my garden bounty. In my opinion, the best way to savor a batch of luscious strawberries requires doing nothing more than making sure you have clean fingers and a plain white dish. Even chilling them seems to steal away some of their flavor.

Unfortunately, to find a good strawberry these days, you must look to your own garden or a farmer's market. And if you are going to eat only one food that is organically grown, make it strawberries. When grown commercially, strawberries are subjected to more herbicides, pesticides, and other poisons than any other food. Years ago I read that in one laboratory test, a single commercially cultivated strawberry was found to contain residue from 22 different toxic chemicals. That doesn't even seem possible. What is more ridiculous is that it is easy to grow delicious, organic strawberries--even on a large scale.

Anyone can raise their own strawberries. If you do not have a garden, you can buy a special strawberry planter and produce a decent little crop in about one square foot of space. My edible garden is made up of twenty-two 4' x 8' raised beds, and my current strawberry patch takes up one of the beds (plus some overflow I can't bear to pull up). It was started in 2001 with 25 plants I ordered from Pinetree Garden Seeds: 15 Honeyoye and 10 Sparkle.

For planting and growing guidance, I turned to my trusted copy of Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening and Landscaping Techniques. I also amended the soil with natural rock powders and mulched with hay and lots of sheep manure (which I know makes everything I grow taste sweeter). I make sure the plants are well watered each August and September, which is when berry size for the next year's crop is determined. After a few hard frosts in late fall, I mulch the entire bed with a thick layer of hay and uncover it in early spring.

I have had no disease problems, and apart from a few bugs, the only real "pests" I have to contend with are the wild turtles. I have never seen a turtle run except when it was hurling itself toward a ripe strawberry. They are very sneaky, but I have caught more than one turtle nestled in my strawberry bed, happily munching away, berry pulp dripping out both sides of its mouth, so absorbed in its bliss that it was totally oblivious to my presence. Once I even busted a female turtle laying eggs in my garden.

Despite turtle attacks, last year I harvested seven gallons of beautiful, delectable berries from that one plot. It was more than we could eat, and I froze many of them in single layers on baking sheets, and then packed them into plastic zipper freezer bags. Once the last berries were picked, I refreshed the bed by pulling out most of the plants so it will keep producing for a few more years.

I also started a new strawberry bed this year. I was at a Garden Club plant sale in April and could not resist buying three plastic grocery bags bags that were each simply labeled Super Strawberries 7/$1.00. They had obviously been dug up from a club member's garden that morning, and now they are flourishing in mine. I can't wait to taste the first harvest.

In the meantime, my old plot has fewer plants this year, but they are loaded with sweet, ripening berries. Their thick fragrance rises up to tantalize me each time I walk by the bed. Today was the first real harvest--I picked well over a quart of berries and only a few had bite marks. (The chickens will get these--no strawberry goes to waste around here.) Today was also the hottest day of the year so far--90 degrees in the shade and very humid. It is too hot to cook, and nothing sounds good anyway. But I've just come up with a perfect idea for dinner. All I need to do is wash my hands and grab a plain white dish.

* Footnote: I kid you not--half an hour after I finished writing this post I went out to water the garden and found a turtle three feet from my strawberry bed. First one I've caught this season. I shrieked "Oh my god!" and it ducked into its shell. I then picked it up, marched across the farmyard, and deposited it just outside the gate into the hayfield, pointing away from the garden. It probably wasn't far enough, but I was in a hurry. I knew I should have left those bite-marked berries as decoys.