my turn.
tiffy's gone on with bread and i've tried my hand at making a cake with olive oil. not just because i want to see how olive oil turns out in cake, but because i was just too darn lazy to bring butter to room temperature. ok, but that turned out to not be a problem this time because i didnt even have butter in my fridge.

over and beyond all that.

the extra-virgin olive oil smelled VERY green when i mixed it with the sugar initially and that scared me a little. because i haven't seen a cake that smells like grass and im quite sure that if i had that i wouldnt eat it. mixed in with the zest and all it was a fragrant handsoap-smelling cake, but i went ahead and baked it. (just because i couldnt be bothered to start again, and i didnt have extra ingredients anyway)


just out, the cake was fragrant. GOOD citrus-smelling and i left it to cool as instructed, although i was worried that i had overbaked it. taking it out of the parchment-lined pan was simple, not cutting into it wasn't.

fresh out of the oven, it was fluffy and the citrus was intense, but just so. the next morning, the citrus had mellowed a little and was pleasantly, but i wonder if i might possibly make a glaze the next time, which i didnt this time because i didnt want to overwhelm the subtle olive oil flavor. have to mention though, that if i hadn't known it was there, i wouldnt quite place it, only the fact that it isnt quite a butter cake.

easy enough, with the olive oil and an electric mixer. i adapted the recipe from here, and made very minor changes, which are in the parentheses.

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour
1+1/2 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp clementine zest (I used about 1.5 tbsp clementine zest, and 1 tbsp lemon zest
3 large eggs
1 cup clementine juice (about 1 cup fresh squeezed clementine juice, and the remaining made up with store-bought orange juice)

QN. What's this?


ANS. My attempt at Struan AKA breakfast loaf for the next two weeks.



Meh, there's bits of parchment paper stuck to it. I put in rice, some multigrain mix consisting of bran, oats and other nonsense stuff so it's pretty nice to eat (rice is still a little crunchy. note to self, cook longer next time). It was hellish to mix the dough because the recipe didn't ask for enough flour.... had to keep going a tablespoonful at a time until it could pass the windowpane test. I must have added nearly a cup more of WW flour!

Click here for the recipe, thanks to Google books for digitalizing this.

I think I should have left it to rise longer, it was more dense than my usual whole wheat bread. Oh well, there's always next time. Yesterday I forgot about the slice of struan sitting in the oven and I had black toast :(