A Honey and Olive Oil Cake, Just For Us!!

I bake a lot and needless to say my husband and I eat a lot of cakes & desserts; farmers market leftovers, extra cupcakes, biscuit trials, not to mention the “research” that has to be done whenever I spot a new bakery or we are on holiday… We spend hours before a trip finding out where we can find the best bread and cakes and planning our itinerary around eating.

Baking for a living is a dream come true however, there is one downside, often we don’t eat the sweet things we actually want to eat! On Saturday night you may feel like chocolate for dessert but you have to eat the 2 slices of lemon tart leftover from the morning’s market, you feel like baking a ginger cake but the freezer has a shelf full of blueberry muffins. Not the end of the world I admit! But it  also means that I don’t try out new recipes as often as I’d like to so today I felt like baking, just for us.

There are 2 recipes I found over Christmas that I have been desperate to try, one is from Ottolenghi’s new book Jerusalem, a delicious sounding Semolina, Coconut & Marmalade Cake, I have a very large bag of desiccated coconut in the cupboard which I am using for coconut macaroons but there are only so many macaroons I can bake so I’ve been on the look-out for other ways to use it up. But I also found a very simple recipe for a honey and olive oil cake originating in Portugal and delicately spiced, today the honey cake won!

The recipe is from a small Penguin paperback book I borrowed from my Dad last year, simply called Portuguese Cookery and the recipe is Bolo Podre de Estremoz. The cake is very simple to make and I mixed it all by hand so no need for an electric mixer! Seeing the bright yellow colour of the mixture was like a glimpse of Spring on this very cold day!

I made a couple of very small changes and here is the recipe:

Bolo Podre de Estremoz

Ingredients:

4 Large Eggs

100 grams golden caster sugar

180ml olive oil (160 grams)

180ml honey (275 grams)

225 grams self raising flour

1 teaspoon mixed spice

1 teaspoon cinnamon (the original recipe has 2 teaspoons of mixed spice but I love cinnamon so added one of each instead!)

Method: 

1)      Grease and line a cake tin, either 20cm square or round. For any ginger or spice cake I always use a square tin, I prefer to eat it in squares rather than cake slices but that’s just me!

2)      Separate the eggs, put the whites to one side, and add the caster sugar to the yolks and whisk together.

3)      Measure the oil into a jug and slowly add to the yolks and sugar whisking all the time.

4)      Measure the honey into the same jug, as you put the oil in first it won’t stick to the jug at all now and you can add it to the mixture slowly and whisk again to combine.

5)      Now sieve in the flour and spices and fold in with a spatula, at this stage the mixture becomes very thick and quite hard to mix.

6)      Whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry and fold in in three batches. The first spoonful should loosen the mixture so mixing in the next two will be much easier.

7)      Transfer to the tin and bake at 150 degrees celcius (fan) or 160 degrees in a normal oven for 1 hour. When you insert a skewer in the middle it should come out clean.

 

The original recipe also calls for the grated zest of 2 oranges and 2 tablespoons of brandy, added just after the honey, but I didn’t have any oranges on hand and I generally don’t like alcohol in desserts so I left these out, I think the orange zest would be lovely but it also tastes delicious without.

In spite of almost a whole jar of honey the cake is not too sweet and very light in texture, probably due to using oil rather than butter/margarine, it has a dark caramel flavour is a beautiful honey colour. It is definitely up there with my favourite ginger cake and much more simple to make. The recipe says the cake improves with time and will keep well, as is the case with most spiced cakes, not that a cake usually lasts very long in our house...