Last Sunday, the rain came down, there was nowhere in my house that wasn’t covered in dust, and I was hiding in the bedroom. Sometimes, the only way to get yourself out of this sort of slump is to bake. So I surfed around to find a regular, plain and everyday cake that I could make. The first place to look was Smitten Kitchen, a great resource for friendly home baking as well as weeknight dinners and birthday cakes.

One of the elegant things about this cake is that it requires no butter, only oil and yoghurt, so you don’t need softened butter on hand, or a mixer to put it together.

What I ended up with was a version of Smitten Kitchen’s lime yoghurt cake with blackberry sauce, which is itself a version of a traditional french yoghurt cake. Having zested part of a lemon earlier in the day, I decided to make this a lemon cake, using up the rest of the lemon zest and the juice.

• 240g plain yoghurt
• 80g sunflower oil
• 230g caster sugar
• zest and juice of one lemon
• 2 eggs

–> whisked together

• 190g plain flour (I used about 1/2 cup wholewheat self-raising)
• 1 tsp baking powder (1.5 if flour is all plain)
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/8 tsp salt

–> into a sieve above the wet ingredients, sifted in, and stirred together until just combined, just until the streaks of flour are gone and no more.

Pour half of the batter into a 22cm/9 inch springform tin. Put small dollops raspberry jam onto the batter – entirely optional, but really very good. The only disappointing thing is that the jam sank to the bottom of the cake. Cover with the other half of the batter.

Bake for 40 minutes at 160C until the top springs back, and it’s very slightly browned.