Olive Oil Cake. Happy Birthday to Shin

It was a lovely Sunday. I invaded my Meimei (my younger sister)’s house, or more specifically, her kitchen with a shopping bag of baking ingredients. It’s the day before her birthday. Since I had chanced upon an interesting yet simple cake recipe online, I was thinking why not trying it for my Meimei’s birthday? Olive oil cake. It did sound like a healthier sort of option; at least a wee bit healthier than a richly buttery one, I presumed.

Why at my Meimei’s house? She has a lovely built-in oven in her kitchen which is a luxury that I with a rented room cannot have. Nevertheless, I am good at invading.

I got the recipe from a blog. It was the Abraço recipe. I googled a bit on Abraço. Obviously, it’s a nice little espresso bar in Manhatten New York. The first picture that I got from their website was the Olive Oil Cake. It definitely sparked off my interest to try making one myself.



I wished I could follow the recipe thoroughly, but I did not have a kosher salt and any mild-flavoured olive oil. So I used what we had at hand --- fine salt and Borges Extra Light Olive Oil, and I also changed the sugar to my preferred brown sugar. To be very frank, these could have been the factors that failed me. *LOL. An extra light olive oil might be just too light for this.



I followed the instructions to bake the cake until the tester inserted into centre coming out clean. It was just about 45 minutes and the colours, the appearance all looked nicely done. It was really quite palatable, but it didn’t turn out to be perfect; I thought the texture was a bit different from what I had expected. It wasn’t as moist and dense as described around. I’ll definitely have to give it a try again.



I know a plain-looking cake like this may not work well for a birthday, but yet, with a little stupid-looking hand-made decorations on it, I suppose the sincerity counts! Happy Birthday, Shin.