As a rule, when I work from home during the week I take an hour at lunchtime to walk somewhere and buy lunch. If I’m feeling indulgent, I sometimes like to order a small piece of cake or another dessert-y item. During the pandemic, I cycled through most (if not all) the dessert options at one of my favorite lunch places, which introduced me to olive oil cake.
Theirs was interesting in that it was so dense. Much closer to a French chocolate cake — the word I’d use is moelleux, or literally “like bone marrow” — than a lighter airier Anglo-American cake like the Victoria sponge.
Most recipes I found online when I tried to recreate it were too light, more a way to cut down on saturated fat in a more traditional cake than anything else. Whether it has any actual basis in fact, the olive oil cake I was thinking of felt like something from the French-Italian border, like the socca in Nice.
After much tinkering, I eventually found something that got close. Unsurprisingly, the trick is making the batter wetter with less leavening and more “binder” (eggs, here). If you wanted to, reducing the leavening even further would make it even denser. I like these quantities to push the cake just the right side of lightness to not seem raw.
The rosewater is worth seeking out. They stock it alongside other ingredients from the Levant at my local supermarket now. As an alternative, something like blood orange juice would work really well.
Ingredients
- 200 g (about 4) eggs
- 100 g sugar
- 50 g rosewater
- 125 g olive oil
- 80 g almond flour
- 60 g all-purpose flour
- 6 g baking powder
Method
Preheat an oven to 180 °C (350 °F). Grease a 20 cm (8") cake tin with a small amount of olive oil, and then line the bottom with parchment paper.
Combine the sugar and eggs in a large bowl and whisk them together vigorously. The mixture should be a light pale yellow and fall in a ribbon from the whisk. Then add the rosewater and olive oil, whisking to combine and make the mixture homogeneous.
Sift in the flours and baking powder, whisking minimally just until the batter is relatively smooth. A few small lumps are preferable to a completely uniform mixture.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin, and then bake the cake for about 30 minutes. The surface should be matte, and the edges just browned. A knife inserted into the cake should come out clean.
Let the cake cool for at least an hour before serving.
juice of 1 lemon 80 g blueberries no rosewater