This cake is very tender and juicy, thanks to the use of the two stage method and the addition of olive oil
ingredients for 8 generous servings (total cost about 6 € pp with organic ingredients)
- 100 g butter
- 80 g olive oil
- 120 g brown (muscovado) sugar
- 30 g honey (ideally a light flavoured, as the one from flower blossoms)
- 4 eggs
- a pinch of salt
- 200 g cake flour
- 12,5 g baking powder
- 2 tbsp orange zest
- 80 ml orange juice
- 1 tbsp chopped fresh sage leaves + a few whole fried leaves to decorate
- Candied peels from oranges and/or other citrus fruits for garnish
- 4 tbsp icing sugar and a few lemon drops to make a glaze
In this recipe, I use half butter, half olive oil for two reasons:
The first is that I use the olive oil as a means of transferring the flavour of the sage to the batter. Sage leaves are often hard and not appropriate for a velvety batter.
The second is to produce a more tender and juicy cake, allowing me to lower the sugar, while keeping the buttery flavour of the cake.
Aiming for even more tenderness I make the batter, using the reverse creaming (or two stage) method, which does not make the cake rise so much, but produces a much more tender and pleasant cake. To compensate the lack of butter mechanical aeration (produced with the classic creaming method), I add a leavening agent, in this case, baking powder.
If we want to completely omit the butter, then we should use 160 ml olive oil and add 20 ml more liquid, in this case orange juice (100 ml instead of 80).
If we do not want to use honey, we increase sugar to 160 g instead of 120.
We can also use tangerines instead of oranges.
So, let´s start.
The day before we pour the olive oil in a saucepan and add 1 – 2 tbsp of chopped fresh sage leaves. We warm it up by placing it in the oven at 150 Celsius degrees for about 10 min, then we turn off the oven and let them inside to infuse, until the oil cools down. The next morning we discard the sage leaves.
We melt the butter.
We adjust the oven rack to lower – middle position and preheat the oven to 175 degrees for a static function. We grease well a a 23 cm Bundt form (of 9 cups full capacity), taking care not to leave spots without lubrication and sprinkle with flour all over, rolling the form to coat well all the inside surface and tapping off the excess.
To prepare the cake batter we lightly whisk the liquid ingredients, that is the egg (along with a pinch of salt), the oil, the orange juice and the honey.
In the bowl of the mixer, we sift the solids all together, we add the orange zest, turn them once in the mixer just to mix, pour in the melted butter, and half of the liquid mixture and beat at low speed, until the solids are wet. We raise the speed to medium – high and beat for 1 minute to aerate the mixture and develop the cake structure.
We then add the remaining liquid mixture in two batches, beating for 20 seconds each time to incorporate them into the mixture and strengthen it.
We pour the batter into the prepared form and bake it for 30-35 minutes in the preheated oven.
When ready, we remove from the oven, allow it to cool for 20 min, then unmold by turning over on a lightly greased wire rack.
Meanwhile, we prepare a simple glaze by melting over very low heat in a saucepan 4 tbsp icing sugar + 1 tbsp water and a few drops of lemon juice and whisking until smooth. If necessary, we add gradually more drops of lemon juice, to adjust thickness. The glaze needs to be thick, yet still pourable. We drizzle the glaze on top of the cake, while still warm and let cool completely.
We garnish with candied orange peels and fried sage leaves on top of which we drop little glaze pearls.
