Orange and Olive Oil Cake

I have always heard of cakes made with Olive Oil, but never had a chance to try it. That, was until I saw the recipe for this beautiful – ‘Orange and Olive Oil Cake’ at Deeba’s ‘Passionate about Baking’. She has a beautiful blog with a lot of delicious cakes and desserts, that it was not easy to narrow down to one recipe, to make for the ‘Tried and Tasted’ event this month, a event series concieved by Zlamushka and now carried on by Lakshmi, this is a beautiful event that encourages food bloggers to try fellow food bloggers’ recipes.

The use of orange juice and zest in this cake, nails the orange flavor and makes for a pretty, rich yellow color in the cake. I absolutely love making loaf cakes, something about the shape is very appealing to me. 🙂 For a cake that has absolutely no butter, this cake is rich, moist and has a great crumb. I followed Deeba’s great suggestion of using a combination of wheat flour and all purpose flour, which makes it an even more healthier cake. Here is the recipe, do try, its awesome.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 large navel oranges + 1 clementine
3/4 cup orange juice, freshly squeezed
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour(I used chapati atta)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
Butter or non stick cooking spray to grease the pan

Method:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9 X 4 loaf pan.

Zest the oranges and the clementine. In a bowl, whisk the zest with the sugar. Use a whisk or a fork and not your hands, as the idea is to permeate the sugar with the oils from the skin of the orange, and not have the flavors stick to your hand. 🙂 You will see that the sugar takes on a pretty orangish, yellow hue, which helps in imparting the color to the cake.

Juice the oranges, to get about 3/4 cups of juice. Set aside.
Sift the dry ingredients: the all purpose flour, whole wheat flour, salt and baking powder and set aside.

Add the oil to the sugar and cream until it melds together. Beat in each of the eggs, until thick, foamy and almost doubled, one by one. Now add about 1/3 cup flour and mix it in, followed by about 1/4 cup of juice. Repeat until the flour and the juice are used up. Scrape the sides of the batter and gently place it in the loaf pan. Bake in the preheated oven, for 50 minutes to 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let cool completely, slice, serve and enjoy!

Verdict: This cake tasted like pound cake, the fruity flavor of oranges, accentuated by the olive oil. I served it to some of my friends and they had a hard time believing that it had no butter and had a little bit of whole wheat flavor. It had a great crumb and texture, tasted rich and buttery. I am gonna try other recipes with olive oil too.

Also sending this to ‘Bookmarked Recipes – Every Tuesday Event – Volume 42’.

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