cake recipe

Oct 23, 2016

The Easiest Coconut Cake You’ll Ever Make

Easy One Bowl Coconut CakeYou won’t find a coconut cake anywhere that’s this easy to make. One bowl. Simple ingredients. Quick and easy recipe. It’s a variation of my easy one bowl yellow cake with just a couple of changes and one of them is of course, lots of coconut. This is an easy cake you can make quickly and have a delicious homemade dessert ready any time.

I try to always use ingredients that most people either have on hand or can easily find. And I always try to bake without butter and I have done it again with this cake. Even the cream cheese frosting is made without butter and I promise you will not miss it. What you will miss is the rest of the cake because it will disappear very quickly! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Oct 3, 2015

Lemon Coconut Cake Without Butter

Lemon Coconut Cake No ButterBelieve it or not, you can make this amazing cake with no butter at all. Baking without butter has become my specialty. The cake is simple. It’s my easy one-bowl yellow cake but with half the vanilla and with added fresh lemon zest. (To keep the edges of the cake from over-baking, I suggest using a cake strip.) While the cake bakes, you make a super easy lemon curd for the filling. Then you spread the curd on a big dinner plate to cool.

And now the frosting. I make an old-fashioned seven-minute frosting because it has no butter, and because it’s light and fluffy and delicious. But seven minutes is a lie!  It actually takes abut nine minutes to make and here’s why. You need to be at the stove with an electric mixer and you beat the frosting in a glass bowl, over a simmering pot of water. It’s basically egg white and sugar and it makes a beautiful, light and airy frosting that tastes like billows of meringue.

The cake is sliced in half to fill with the lemon curd and then the top of the cake goes back on and it’s frosted all over with 7-minute frosting. After that you sprinkle the top with sweetened shredded coconut and press more coconut on to the sides. The just wait for the raves, especially from lemon-lovers.

If you don’t want to make the frosting and want something simpler, you can slice and fill the cake and just spread it with the lemon glaze that I use on my lemon brownies and sprinkle the top with coconut. Here’s how that looks…

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Either way you make it, you’ll have a delicious dessert without butter. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Jul 21, 2015

Lemon Blueberry Cake – a good mistake

Lemon Bueberry Bundt Cake RecipeBlueberries are on sale! That means I need to make my lemon blueberry bundt cake today and I need it in time for dinner. I always made this amazing cake with only 1/3 cup of butter but today I mistakenly used only 3 tablespoons of butter and guess what? It was moist and delicious! This was a good mistake.

OMG – this is so delicious! And now it has even less butter. I use the zest of three lemons and a whole bunch of blueberries (one and a half cups). If you wash the berries, make sure they’re dry before adding them to the batter. Otherwise, they can sink.

It’s the fresh lemon zest that gives all the flavor so don’t skimp on the lemons. When you take the zest off take just the yellow part and avoid the white part, which is bitter.

Start with all your ingredients at room temperature and take your time. It takes 7-8 minutes with an electric mixer to get the batter just right. But what a reward! I like to top my finished cake with a simple glaze made with lemon juice and powdered sugar but you can also dust it with a little powdered sugar. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Jan 26, 2015

Updated Marble Loaf Cake

Chocolate Marble Loaf Cake Recipe

I just posted the updated recipe for my marble loaf cake that I love so much. I went back to the original way that I was making it, which involved beating egg whites and folding them into the batter at the end. I had eliminated that step to make the recipe easier and less work but after making it a few times, I realized I should have left it alone.

So… good news / bad news. The good news is the loaf is light and fluffy again and the bad news is it takes a little more work – well just the one extra step of beating the egg whites.

If you hate washing pans (who doesn’t?) you will like this. If you do what I do and line the loaf pan completely with foil, you won’t have to wash the pan. And I don’t even grease the foil but you can if you want to. I just peel away the foil from the loaf, after about 15 minutes of cooling. But be careful when putting in the foil and use your knuckles in the corners so it doesn’t tear.

You’ll notice that I beat the egg whites first. When beating egg whites there must be no fat whatsoever in the bowl, not from the yolk or from beaters not are not completely clean. So use your clean beaters on the whites first. Now you can continue using the beaters on the second mixture without having to clean them first. My first recipe had fresh orange zest added and that is still an option. You can add the zest of an orange along with the flour but I like it both ways, with and without the orange zest.

This marble loaf is the first thing I make for company because it makes a beautiful presentation and goes really well with coffee or tea. And people will be amazed when you say, “There’s no butter at all in this cake.” I hope you’ll try my new, updated marble loaf cake. Click here for the new recipe. (Still want the old recipe? Click here) – Jenny Jones

Filed Under: Sweets
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Jan 15, 2014

Greek Walnut Cake

Greek Walnut Cake Recipe

There’s no butter in this moist and sweet walnut cake. The Greeks call it karithopita and what makes it so moist is that you soak it in a spicy syrup made with cinnamon, lemon peel, and cloves. Just poke a few holes around the top of the cake and pour over a warm, sweet syrup. A lot of Greek desserts use a syrup – baklava is a great example.

I always feel better when I can bake something sweet for dessert without butter. This cake uses oil and since it’s a Greek cake, I use heart-healthy olive oil. Both olive oil and walnuts are considered heart-healthy. Any time I bake with nuts, I always toast them first and I suggest doing it for this cake, especially because there are a LOT of walnuts in the recipe and toasted walnuts always make a cake or cookies taste better.

My stepmother is Greek so I have grown to love Greek food (and her, too). She is the one who told me to poke holes in the cake before pouring on the syrup since not all recipes use holes but it really helps soak the cake beautifully. My Greek walnut cake can be served warm or cold. Make it for your next party. Opa! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones