White chocolate and lemon Easter lamb cake

Remember the lamb cake moulds I bought lately? The came into use now … of course: Easter is only once in a year.

I was wondering, which kind of cake my lamb should be. Although I love this catholic Easter tradition – it seems to have its roots especially in Southern Germany and the old Habsburg countries – my experience with most of the Easter lamb cakes I’ve tasted was a rather dry matter, if not to say dust-dry. So instead of  a sponge cake I wanted a more moist and less fluffy cake. For some freshness I added the zest and juice of one lemon, as well as a a bit of yoghurt. Instead of sugar and butter and for an extra taste, I thought to use white chocolate. The plan worked out only halfway: I had to add some additional sugar and the taste of the white chocolate was … um … not very intense; but apart from the flavour perspective, it did it’s job. But feel free to add some butter if you would like the cake to be more brittle.

I thought about covering the cooled down lamb with some frosting (white chocolate, or perhaps black tea?) but decided to stay with simple icing sugar.

I didn’t have a clear idea how much batter I would need and used 200 g of flour as base. I ended up with some leftover batter that I filled into my mini Gugelhupf moulds, which was also fine. But, as my lamb mould is a bit smaller as the ones you usual get, you should be fine with the 200 g flour. I had to cut off the bottom of the lamb as well because I filled a bit too much batter into the mould (as you can clearly see on the pictures 😉 )… no big deal and some more leftovers I could nibble before actually cutting the lamb.

By the way, when I bought the mould on the antiques market it didn’t have clips with it. The nearby hardware store helped me out with some clips which were originally ment to hold curtains (just clipped the rings) but were a good alternative for my purposes. To make my lamb stand in a straight horizontal line, I build a construction with another baking pan and some aluminium foil. A bit complicated, but it worked!

White chocolate lemon Easter lamb cake (1 lamb)

Common lamb moulds have a capacity of 0,7 litre, but mine is a bit smaller. This recipe should be enough for the normal ones, as I had some leftover batter.

ingredients
♦ 200 g flour, 100 g white chocolate, 2 eggs, 3 tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 organic lemon, 5 tablespoons yoghurt, dash of salt
♦ butter, icing sugar

preparation
Blend white chocolate. Wash and grate lemon. Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, chocolate, lemon zest, sugar, salt) and wet ingredients (eggs, yoghurt, lemon juice) in two separate bowls, then fold both together. Preheat oven to 180° C. Grease baking mould with butter. Fill batter into lamb mould or other baking pan and bake for 45 min. Remove cake from oven and let cool com­pletely in mould on a cool­ing rack. Carefully remove mould. Cover lamb cake with icing sugar.