If we can cook it, you can cook it!

Orange and Olive Oil Cake

Spread the love
         For us, fall starts bang on Labor Day.  That’s it for Andrew being at the beach.  His real estate business in the city totally takes over his every weekend.  We will be lucky if he gets to Bridgehampton once between then and Thanksgiving.  This leaves me alone out there because, between Monte’s Ham and the blogs I work on, I need to be there at least every two weeks.  What it also does, is pretty well rule out having a fabulous dessert to take to fall parties.  Because I don’t really bake any more at all.  It reminds me of the old joke about the Limousine pulling up to the Plaza Hotel.  The chauffeur opens the trunk and removes a wheel chair.  He then opens the car door and assists a young man into the chair.  The boy’s mother follows and as they reach the hotel door, the doorman says to the mother; “I am so sorry your son can’t walk”.  The mother answers: “Can’t walk? Thank God he doesn’t have to.”  Can’t bake?  Thank God I don’t have to. Except recently I did and the results were really well received.

         Of course, I didn’t make this first. Andrew did.  He made it last year and it was so moist, so incredibly orange scented that it was perfect, bringing us a shot of sunshine in the dead of winter.  It also struck me at the time that it didn’t look all that hard to make.  Andrew is very well organized and keeps a “baking diary” listing what he baked and whom he baked it for and where he got the recipe.  In this case, it was from Mario Batali’s “Simple Italian Food: Recipes from my two Italian villages” (Clarkson Potter 1998). 

Bill Buford (L) and Mario Batali (R)

Now Mario Batali is a larger-than-life figure in New York cooking circles.  He owns some of the most successful and highly regarded restaurants in the city.  I became totally fascinated with Mario when I read “Heat”, the 2007 book by Bill Buford that followed the author’s  “Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” (Vintage 2007).  Who could resist?  Mr. Buford’s adventures revolved around Chef Batali.  He worked for the man at this immensely popular Green Village restaurant “Babbo”.   And he followed in his hero’s footsteps and went to same Italian villages Batali did to learn his craft.  So all in all, any recipe with Mario’s name attached to it is all right by me.   

This cake is particularly all right because it’s pretty darn easy to make.  And it’s fascinating how people react just by hearing its name. Olive oil in a cake?  But the olive oil here is what gives the cake its moist texture and, dare I say it, makes the cake a lot healthier than most butter-laden cakes.  Finally, it tastes delicious, it perfumes the whole house with the scent of oranges while its baking.  And it’s a crowd pleaser.  I took this cake to a small dinner party.  We all decorously at a single sliver.  I left the cake for my friends to enjoy.  I got a really nice email from my friend Jeff saying he’d taken what was left over to another dinner party the next night, tarted up with some orange slices and it was a hit there too.  My only caveat is to really watch your cooking times.  You want a really moist cake here and 50 minutes in the oven should be plenty of time for it to bake. Here’s the recipe.



1 thought on “Orange and Olive Oil Cake”

  • "A shot of sunshine in the dead of winter.." I get it! I'm in! Thank you Andrew, and Monte, it's ok if you don't bake, you get to be the quality control guy.. not a bad gig at all! Oranges, Olive oil and Mario dancing in my head…Yum. C:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.