Sԋҽ ԃσҽʂɳ'ƚ Ⴆαƙҽ

𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝓈𝒽𝑒'𝓈 𝒶𝓁𝓈𝑜 𝑜𝒷𝓈𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓁𝑒𝓂𝑜𝓃𝓈

I normally never bake. Not interested. On the rare occasions however when I’m feeling kind enough to bake - for baking is an act of kindness by my standards (by which I mean, doing something I have zero interest in for the sake of others), and one I don’t indulge in often - well, on those occasions, I bake an extremely simple but extremely delicious lemon olive oil cake of my own devising.

Professional bakers, and amateur bakers who ape the talking points of professional bakers, will tell you that no serious baking can be undertaken without ingredients which are measured by scale. They can all get fucked in my book because my lemon olive oil cake is perfect and you don’t need a scale to make it. You don’t need any appliances or special equipment to make it. All you need, aside from an oven and a bowl and a baking dish, which I’ll assume you already have at hand, is a whisk, a half cup measure and a sieve. If you really had to, you could even dispense with the sieve and use a fork instead of a whisk, if really necessary.

My lemon olive oil cake is LEMONY. If you don’t like lemon and unctuous cakes, look away. It’s fashionable now to use vanilla bean paste for every recipe which calls for vanilla but it’s really not always suitable. I use vanilla bean paste and vanilla pods too but that’s not what is called for in this cake. A vanilla forward flavor is not what is looked for. This is a lemon forward cake and vanilla extract is used only as an accent, not as a dominant note. To enhance the floral notes of citrus, I instead deploy Angostura bitters. This is how I make my lemon olive oil cake:

Preheat oven to 180C (fan forced)

Finely grate the zest of 1 lemon, and squeeze its juice, into a bowl

Add half a cup of caster sugar to the bowl and whisk

To the sugar/juice/zest mixture, add half a cup of extra virgin olive oil (must be a fruity extra virgin oil, such as would be suitable for salad) and whisk to combine

To this, add two cracked eggs and whisk in

Add a dash of vanilla extract and 4 drops of Angostura bitters and whisk

A few grinds here of sea salt is very necessary. You can use any salt but sea salt is so lovely with lemon

Finally, add 1 cup of sieved self raising fine pastry or cake flour and whisk gently to combine to a smooth goo

With your clean fingers, wipe any baking dish all over with olive oil (an essential non stick measure = this batter is wet)

Pour the batter into the oiled baking dish, put it in the oven for 20 min, and then lick the mixing bowl and whisk clean

Remove the cake from the oven after 20 minutes and leave it in the baking dish. It doesn’t truly need to be iced as it’s delicious and moist as is, but if you want to, mix the juice of one lemon with enough icing sugar to taste (I’m told over and over again that my taste is far too acerbic) and drizzle the saucy icing over the cake while still in the dish. Slice and serve directly from the baking dish

This cake needs no accompaniment but if you did serve it with champagne, or with coffee and vanilla ice cream, either would be just fine

The day of cake: people who know me well bring me their (organic) dead headed roses. Because I use the rosehips and petals in cooking

The day of the cake