Learn how to make Justine's Strawberry and Olive Oil Cake. Olive oil cake is one of the biggest baking trends right now, and for good reason. Swapping butter for olive oil creates an incredibly moist, tender crumb that stays fresh for days. This easy strawberry olive oil cake recipe is made in just one bowl, and ready in under an hour making it the perfect afternoon tea showstopper or weekend baking project.
______________________________ Ingredients: 3 eggs 200g raw caster sugar 180ml light olive oil 180ml yoghurt, ideally strained overnight Zest of 1 lemon 250g self-raising flour Pinch of salt 1 punnet of strawberries, quartered 1 large handful of almond flakes
Method: Preheat the oven to 160°C and line a slice tin with baking paper.
Whisk the eggs and sugar until thick and pale. Slowly whisk in the olive oil followed by the yoghurt and zest.
Fold in flour and salt and then half of the berries. Sprinkle over the almonds and remaining berries, and bake 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
I always think it's important to have a few really good cake recipes up your sleeve, just like this one.
This is my olive oil and yogurt strawberry cake, and it's very simple.
So we'll start with three whole eggs. We're going to crack them into a bowl.
Now I'm using strawberries for mine, but you can change up the berries.
You could even just leave it quite neutral and just use the lemon and almonds, which I'm also adding for this.
To this, I'm adding some raw caster sugar. If you don't have raw caster sugar, of course, just use your regular caster sugar.
I kind of like the caramelly flavor of that. That's why I use the raw sugar, and I'm going to whisk this until it's fluffy.
Okay, that's looking great. See how that's fluffed up? It's pale in color.
That's what we're after, and that sugar is dissolved into the eggs. Now to flavor it with some lemon zest.
I just love lemon zest in cakes. You could also use orange zest for this, too. It just really imparts quite a fresh flavor.
So in it goes.
And then some yogurt.
180 mils of Greek-style yogurt, just the plain yogurt, and the same amount of oil. So 180 mils.
Now I like to use Bertolli light olive oil. You want an oil that's going to be neutral.
You don't want anything to be too strong or overpowering.
What the light olive oil is going to impart is a beautiful texture to our cake.
It's going to be fluffy, and it's going to be moist. So I'll measure that out correctly, and
this is the trick to making the cake so lush. So in with the oil, and
we'll give it another quick blend.
Right, the wet ingredients are done. In with some self-raising flour, and
self-raising flour has the rising agent, so no need for extra baking powder. And instead of using the mixer again,
I'm going to get that out of the way. I like to use a spatula here just to fold everything together.
I don't want to overwork the gluten in the flour. So giving that a mix to incorporate it.
Being quite gentle, and you can see we've got a beautiful
light batter.
Okay, I'm just going to pop that to the side for one moment while we get on to the strawberries. Now a little trick to
ensure that your strawberries don't fall all the way down to the bottom of the cake, is to pop them in some extra flour.
So I'm just going to cut these into quarters,
just like this.
And I have a small bowl of extra flour here.
And what I like to do is just place all of my strawberries in the bowl and lightly dust them. By doing that, it
gives them just a slight coating to ensure they don't all fall down to the bottom.
So I'll get on with these, and then we can put the whole cake together.
All
right, strawberries are done. I'm going to add about half of these to the batter and the rest
I'm going to sprinkle over the top. So we'll just fold them in.
Great, happy with that. Now you can use a round tin for this. I'm actually going to make a slab style cake.
So just in a tin like this that's been lined with baking paper, and we'll pop the cake batter in. It's a perfect amount.
I'm just going to spread it out.
And it looks quite thin now, but rest assured with all of that self-raising flour in it,
it will get a lovely lift. And the rest of these strawberries will just scatter over the top.
So loads of strawberries in this. How pretty does that look?
Not finished yet. The last thing that I like to add is some crunch. So some flaked almonds.
Sprinkle that over the top. And I've preheated the oven to
160 degrees. And this is going to cook for about 30 to 40 minutes or until a skewer pierced in the center comes out clean.
What a lovely cake this has turned out to be. And do allow it to cool when it comes out of the oven. And look
at all the strawberries. You can see that they've stayed nicely at the surface.
So we'll carefully remove that.
And just to make it look extra special, I'm going to dust it with some icing sugar just over the top.
And let's cut into this to see
the texture inside. I'll just cut off the end bit there.
Oh, have a look at that. See how fluffy that is and tender. That's what we're after.
That's because of the use of the oil and the yogurt. I'm going to cut these into chunks.
I kind of like this shape because it's so much easier to pop into a lunchbox
if you want to take a treat along with you. And then I'm just going to pile them up on this plate.
That looks so good. And just the smell of those strawberries is just fantastic.
These are the types of cake that I crave. Simple cakes.
They cook quickly and they're full of flavor. Nothing worse than a dry cake.
And as you can see here, this ain't one of them. Have a taste.
It's simply perfect.
