Bake a cake with olive oil
Butter will always remain one of my favorite ingredients to bake with, but sometimes it really does have to make way for something else. Do you ever bake a cake with olive oil? If not, you definitely should give it a try.
Using oil instead of butter gives cakes a completely different texture. Cakes baked with oil are generally more moist. Butter naturally solidifies at room temperature, while olive oil remains liquid, which makes for moist cakes. Exactly what you want. Olive oil also adds flavor, so always use good-quality extra virgin olive oil for the best taste.
Italy
Don’t think that using olive oil in your baked goods is some new health-freak trend to consume less saturated fat (yum). In many countries, baking with olive oil has been commonplace for years. In Italy, for example, there is the ciambellone: a fresh lemon cake made with olive oil. It is often baked in a Bundt pan, but in this recipe it simply goes into a springform pan, which works perfectly well too.
Greece
In any case, many olive oil cakes are baked with citrus. In Greece, there is revani: also an olive oil cake with citrus. However, revani is not made with regular flour, but with semolina, which again gives it a completely different texture and flavor.
Pandan cake
By the way, olive oil isn’t the only type of oil you can bake with. Always use olive oil in Italian and Levantine recipes, but never do so in Asian recipes. Olive oil is not used anywhere in Asia, and its flavor would completely overpower the baked good. In the Indonesian pandan cake, neutral oil—often sunflower oil—is used to achieve that unparalleled spongy texture.
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