Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
Before I try to convince you to try the crazy-sounding ingredient in this cake, I need you to know that it’s sitting on top of a flawless, crisp-chewy, endlessly malleable olive oil cake you will want to pocket even without dabbling in the weird. And the batter takes all of 10 minutes to stir together (really). So hold on to that.
But for now, I would like you to suspend disbelief about this seemingly un-cake-like ingredient. Ready for it? Oil-cured black olives (the kind that are preserved in salt and plumped in olive oil, not in a vinegary brine). That’s what’s speckled all over the top of this sparkly, sugar-crusted cake—not blueberries. Surprise!
Why do such a thing to a cake? For starters, this merely nudges our sweet-savory boundaries out a little bit farther, a natural next step from chocolate-covered pretzels and miso caramel. For another, everyone I’ve peddled it to at Food52 HQ and beyond went bug-eyed and smitten—even the ones who’ve been on Team Hold-the-Olives for life.
And finally, because olives in dessert aren’t actually so weird after all. As I was hunting recipes for our Genius Desserts cookbook, the theme came up a lot: in chocolate and cannoli; candied in China, studded in cookies from Portugal, sunk in clafoutis in Marseille.
But the first place that many food and coffee nerds near New York—including myself and this Genius cake’s inventor, Charlotte Druckman—saw oil-cured black olives in a dessert was on the crunchy planks of shortbread at Abraço, a button-sized cult coffee shop in the East Village with a destination pastry case, stocked by baker-owner Elizabeth Quijada.
Quijada's semi-sweet olive shortbread was one source of inspiration that got Charlotte’s wheels turning when an olive oil start-up called Brightland asked her to develop a recipe that featured their olive oil called Alive.
Charlotte combined that shortbread notion with the basic framework of Marian Burros’ famous Purple Plum Torte. Then she pushed and pulled on the ingredients to play off the rich, chocolatey, slightly funky flavor of the olives—swapping in some almond meal for buttery texture, adding molasses-y moisture from brown sugar, and ratcheting up the vanilla.
Related: More on the genius of lots of vanilla and why olive oil makes a more lasting cake than butter.
And, since she wrote a whole book on inventive ways to cook and bake in cast-iron skillets called Stir, Sizzle, Bake (you might remember her certified Genius Cacio e Pepe Shortbread as one of them), she then poured this aromatic batter into a very hot cast-iron pan.
The chopped olives polka-dotted the top along with a sanding of crunchy granulated sugar, and this cake was born: crisp-sweet and bronzed on every surface, tender and hauntingly scented with vanilla through the middle, all of it teetering joyfully on the midpoint of salty, buttery, and sweet. I’d like to note that she did all of this the first time it came into her brain. Who said recipe development had to be painstaking?
But she hasn’t stopped there. Since then, she’s used this blueprint without the olives, too: with cacao nibs folded into the batter and Marcona almonds snuggled on top; with ground pistachios replacing the almond flour and miso stirred in. She’s mulled adding chopped rosemary and orange zest to the original olive version, and topping with labne or crème fraîche and streaks of more good olive oil.
All of which is to say that you can push and pull and make your own versions of this cake, too. Tell us what you’ll do! Promise we won’t think you’re weird.
| 3/4 | cup (95g) all-purpose flour |
| 1/4 | cup (25g) almond meal |
| 1 | teaspoon baking powder (the aluminum-free kind, if you can find it) |
| 1/8 | teaspoon fine salt |
| 1/2 | cup (100g) light or dark brown sugar |
| 1/2 | cup (100g) granulated sugar, divided |
| 1/2 | cup (110g) extra-virgin olive oil |
| 2 | large eggs |
| 1 | tablespoon vanilla extract |
| 5/8 | cup (80g) pitted oil-cured black olives, roughly chopped |
| 3/4 | cup (95g) all-purpose flour |
| 1/4 | cup (25g) almond meal |
| 1 | teaspoon baking powder (the aluminum-free kind, if you can find it) |
| 1/8 | teaspoon fine salt |
| 1/2 | cup (100g) light or dark brown sugar |
| 1/2 | cup (100g) granulated sugar, divided |
| 1/2 | cup (110g) extra-virgin olive oil |
| 2 | large eggs |
| 1 | tablespoon vanilla extract |
| 5/8 | cup (80g) pitted oil-cured black olives, roughly chopped |
Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what's so smart about it) at [email protected].
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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37 Comments
yes! seconding this! but noting you might want to add a little more salt to the batter--at least 1/4 teaspoon (instead of 1/8) and i, personally, might go up to 1/2 teaspoon, but as you can tell from this recipe, i'm big into salt with my sweet.
I had a group gathering, making a complex dark chocolate dessert with butter & eggs as well as a vegan version using coconut oil and flax seed/water as egg replacement.
The vegan version was taller, lighter, moister and preferred by all.
L
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