Eugenia’s Olive Oil Pound Cake
What interesting times we live in.
When not attending marches, mopping up after barfing kitties, tending husbands with neuromuscular disease who caught cold (a volatile and potentially fatal combination), your hostess took it into her head to mess with a pound cake recipe.
(Kitty and husband are fine. You were perhaps wondering.)
That’s blood orange juice. We’re not up to anything weird around here. Weirder than usual, anyway.
Never mind that this recipe comes from Eugenia Bone, canning goddess, mushrooming expert, and award-winning author of five books.
You’ think the IK could leave well enough alone, but no. The goal was a lemony cake using Meyer lemons, which are in season just now. The IK adores Meyer lemons. They’re a cross between regular lemons and either oranges or tangerines. In addition to being a cheerful bright yellow, Meyer lemons have the most wonderful, florally fragrant scent, smelling exactly how you imagine lemons should smell.
So the IK baked a pound cake, riffing off Eugenia’s recipe, then another. The first was perfectly nice, but neither lemony enough nor sweet enough. The second? This photo doesn’t really do justice to what a damp mess it was. Maybe you get the idea.
While the IK’s baking skills have improved much in recent months, this hardly means she should seek employment at Tartine Bakery.
In Something To Declare, Julia Alvarez includes a collection of “Declarations, or Ten of my Writing Commandments.” Number six is the anonymous haiku about composing a poem the way one runs an empire or cooks a small fish. Here’s the kicker: there are small fish like anchovies, and there are eeny weeny fish, like whitebait, and then you get into seafood, like scallops or shrimp. And molluscs, they’re a whole ‘nother thing, right? Then you gotta worry about who is personning the stove–is it Zak Pelaccio or Sonny Perdue?
Maybe you’re wondering what in hell I’m going on about.
What I’m saying is this: sometimes you can wing it, but sometimes you can’t, and the wisdom comes in knowing when to make the call.
Eugenia’s Olive Oil Pound Cake
with minor adaptations from Eugenia Bone’s The Kitchen Ecosystem recipe for Orange Olive Oil Pound Cake
Yield: One nine-inch pound cake
Baking time: approximately one hour, ten minutes
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
pinch table salt or fine sea salt
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup olive oil (see notes)
1/2 cup whole milk or half-and-half (see notes)
2 tablespoons brandy
2 tablespoons orange liqueur
1 tablespoon grated orange zest (see notes)
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh orange juice
Unsalted butter for the baking tin
You will need a medium mixing bowl, a large mixing bowl–at least 4 quart or larger, and a 9×5 inch loaf pan.
Preheat the oven to 325F. Generously butter the baking pan, including the sides and corners.
Blend the flour, baking powder, and salt in the smaller bowl. Set aside.
In the larger bowl, blend the eggs, sugar, olive oil, milk or half-and-half, liquors, zests, and orange juice. I find a whisk does the best job.
Add the dry ingredients to the larger bowl and blend, whisking from the bottom. Again, a whisk does the best job. The batter will tend toward wet.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 60-70 minutes. Eugenia Bone says the cake will smell done when it’s ready, and she is right. A toothpick tester will come out clean as well. Having baked this numerous times, I find the cake needs the full 70 minutes in my oven, which is accurate.
Remove and cool on a rack. When cool enough to handle, tip cake out of pan. The olive oil means this cake stays moist, well-wrapped, for about 4 days at room temperature. It also freezes well.
A scattering of powdered sugar is always nice.
Notes:
Be sure to use a mild, light tasting olive oil for this cake.
As I keep half-and-half in the house, I used it instead of milk with good results.
I find zesting easier if the fruit is bone dry, and used blood oranges here.
The original recipe calls for a glaze, which I leave off, because I make this as a portable breakfast item for my spouse, and glazes don’t lend themselves to porting.
