olive-oil poundcake
(vegetarian)
a work in progress

recipe by m-c

Olive-oil poundcake? Have I ever actually tasted such a thing, or is it just a figment of my imagination?

just the recipe

what I was looking for

A loaf cake with a poundcake texture (very close crumb, exactly at the midpoint between moist and dry), not too sweet, and with the haunting grassy, bitter flavor of olive oil.

what I made

A loaf cake with almost the right texture, a little too moist, a little too sweet, with no olive-oil flavor to speak of, a bit burned on the outside, a bit raw in the crown.

My starting point was the recipe for Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake in Lisa A. Sheldon's Olive Oil Baking (Cumberland House, 2007, page 28). But as I worked I realized that I should have started one step sooner by making an old recipe I had already made a thousand times before to get my oven calibrated.

I plan to be working on this recipe over the next several months till I get it right; I'll keep you up to date.

grades for my version

healthy	D	Eat only a small portion.
fast	F	Not fast at all.
easy	C	Not particularly easy.
cheap	A	Like most baked goods, cheap ingredients.
delicious	D	D as an olive-oil poundcake, much work still to do. As a lemon poundcake, B+.

yield

1 loaf, small portions for 16 people.

equipment

   a loaf pan, approximately 5 ¼" wide x 9" long x 3" high
   a small bowl
   a large bowl
   a handheld mixer

getting ready to cook

ingredients	Lisa	m-c	why?
all-purpose flour	1 cup	1 cup	no change
whole-wheat pastry flour	1 cup	1 cup	no change
baking powder	½ teaspoon	½ teaspoon	no change
baking soda	¼ teaspoon	¼ teaspoon	no change
salt	½ teaspoon	to taste	no change
poppy seeds	2 Tablespoons	---	tastier [1]
Notes
[1]	I'm not going for a muffin thing here -- poundcake should be elegant and spare.

Preheat your oven to ... some temperature. I decided to set it to 350°, as Lisa's recipe recommended. Too hot. I have a convection oven, and it needs to be adjusted downward because convection heat is more effective than still heat. Next time I'll 325° -- but on a familiar recipe, not one I'm making for the first time.

   Grease or grease and sugar your loaf pan. If your oven isn't too hot, sugaring will give the cake a lovely crunchy crust; if you oven is too hot, as mine was, the sugar crust will burn.

   Mix the dry ingredients together.

the egg mixture

ingredients	Lisa	m-c	why?
large eggs	4	4	no change
sugar	1 ⅓ cups ordinary sugar	1 ⅓ cups vanilla sugar	tastier, I thought [1]
olive oil	½ cup	½ cup	no change
lemon zest	1 Tablespoon	1 Tablespoon	no change [2]
lemon juice	3 Tablespoons	3 Tablespoons	no change [3]
flavoring	1 teaspoon vanilla extract	1 teaspoon Jack Daniel's	tastier, I thought [4]
Notes
[1]	Here's my first mistake. I am inordinately proud of keeping vanilla sugar on hand, and Lisa's recipe does call for vanilla extract below, so I automatically used vanilla sugar. Wrong. Olive oil has a much more retiring flavor than I realized.
[2]	Second mistake -- the lemon zest swamps out any other flavors.
[3]	I'm betting the lemon juice flavor will support the olive oil once I get rid of all the extraneous flavors; time will tell.
[4]	Wrong again -- I mustn't use any additional flavorings if I want the olive oil to stand out.

      Beat the eggs till they're loose-looking and foamy. Then beat in the sugar till the mixture changes color and becomes light lemon-colored, like an upscale powder room.

Here's an excellent tip from Alton Brown (I'm Just Here for More Food, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2004, page 176 flap) on not going too far in beating the sugar into the oil:

Although you're no longer able to see sugar granules, if you rub a bit of the creamed fat between your fingers you should still be able to feel them.

Then beat in the olive oil, the lemon zest, the lemon juice, and the Jack Daniel's.

dry, wet, dry, wet

ingredients	Lisa	m-c	why?
sour cream	½ cup non-fat or low-fat	½ cup whole-cream	tastier [1]
Notes
[1]	Eat smaller portions of real food, not bigger portions of stuff that tastes like chalk.

Beat in half the dry ingredients, then half the sour cream, then the other half of the dry ingredients, then the other half of the sour cream. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl to be sure there are no lurking pockets of dry stuff and beat one final whir.

bake

Pour the batter into the loaf pan, scraping out every last little bit. Bang the loaf pan on the table gently to be sure there are no sizable air pockets in the corners of the pan.

Bake the loaf for ... 50 minutes? We shall have to see.

Let the pan cool off completely before emptying out the cake.

Poundcake is not better hot out of the oven, but once it has cooled off it's glorious toasted.

thinking it through

So why would somebody publish a recipe for olive-oil poundcake in which no hint of the flavor of olive oil comes through?

Thinking the experience, I now realize that I should have been on my guard from the very first moment. The subtitle of Lisa's book is Healthy Recipes That Increase Good Cholesterol & Reduce Saturated Fats. The introduction is by Mary M. Flynn, Ph.D., R.D. (Registered Dietician), L.D.N. (Licensed Dietician/Nutritionist). And the back flap tells us that Lisa is working on her master's degree in clinical nutrition at the University of Massachusetts.

Her interest in olive-oil baking is that it's healthy, not that it tastes like olive oil. I'm not saying the cake is nasty -- on the contrary, she's done a remarkable job of making a poundcake with half a cup of olive oil instead of half a pound of butter. It was just naive of me to focus on the olive-oil part to the exclusion of any other considerations.

I'll go back to her recipe next time, but meanwhile I need to figure out how to bake a loaf cake in my convection oven. For that I should start with a recipe I've been cooking for seventy-eleven years, apple peel bread, based on Craig Claiborne's apple bread (The New York Times Cookbook, Harper & Row, 1961, page 483). Check back in a while.

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