Still Feeling Peckish

So friend E and I were at a Greek restaurant for lunch yesterday and enjoying the freshness of the Greek salad and the lovely taste of good olive oil. Needless to say our conversation revolves around food and by the time we rolled out of Bakalaki Greek Taverna we had pitched a challenge to each other to make something featuring olive oil. Both of us have kitchens that are overflowing with stuff and so pantry challenges are never a fear to us.

Olive oil is not an ingredient that you would usually think of in baking; most people would use butter for cakes and the like. But I realized that it is possible to do so – I was really tempted to do Nigella’s flourless chocolate olive oil cake, but in the end I wanted to have something light and tangy instead. It helped that I had a small tub of lemon curd sitting in the fridge and so I started to build the idea of making cake fingers (apart from an overstocked pantry I have every incarnation of baking moulds and I have silicon mould with simple rectangles) and creating lemon curd cake sandwiches.

Over time, I’ve become more confident doing low carb bakes and using almond flour, whey protein powder and eggs to create basic cake mixes. It was fun doing my version of alchemy this morning in the kitchen; in the end the concept was just to substitute olive oil for the butter I would usually put in a cake, but I used lemon to balance out any olive oil-ish flavour that may have overpowered the cake.

It turned out that my refrigerator only had 2 leftover lemon halves (it shows how disorganized we are in keeping our stock current), so that pretty much determined the amount of cake batter I could make. Still, the cake component was light and lemony and I figure was good enough to eat on its own even without the lemon curd.

After doing this pantry challenge I realized that we forgot to organize a food tasting, but anyway I checked this through kid#2 who deemed this recipe as a “super win”!