Last year, after over a decade of having the famous Maialino olive oil cake recipe bookmarked, I finally made their cake for an extended family gathering at Chris’s parents’ cousins’ house a few blocks away from us. It was a huge, tall cake: nine inches in diameter, over three inches in height. Even with over 15 people in attendance, we had a lot of leftover cake. So, I did take about a third of the cake home. It was a beautiful and delicious cake, but I remember it was quite dense and large, so definitely not an everyday cake that I could just whip up if a couple people came over for dinner. I needed an equivalent that was lighter, fluffier, smaller, and with an airier crumb.

After I made that cake in the spring of last year, I went searching for a different olive oil cake variation, and lo and behold, I found what seemed like the perfect one on Serious Eats (where else?!). The Serious Eats recipe for olive oil cake can be comfortably made in an eight-inch cake pan with a two-inch height (so a lot more doable if we had a party of four or five dining together). It uses just one egg (versus Maialino’s three eggs), and to create a more complex tasting crumb, instead of milk, it uses buttermilk. The whole mixing process from end to end could take just five minutes if you have everything pre-measured out; the entire cake bakes in 33 minutes! This recipe uses 3/4 cup of olive oil, while the Maialino recipe uses 1 1/3 cups (same flavor impact, a lot less olive oil, which when you are buying a premium variety, is very expensive!). Of course, with an olive oil cake, the olive oil flavor is the star of the show, so you want to use the purest, freshest, most delicious olive oil you can get your hands on. I finally pulled out my Terra Delyssa Tunisian extra virgin olive oil for baking this cake. I was excited about Terra Delyssa when I found it at Costco this past spring, and I knew it would be perfect for baking based on how fresh it was (just picked and processed this past February!).

After I baked and un-molded the cake, I loved how light it felt in my hand as I placed it on a serving plate. And when I cut into it this evening after dinner and had my first bite, it tasted like the most perfect olive oil cake: rich in olive oil flavor, not too sweet, a light, fluffy crumb, and extremely moist. I used lemon zest and some homemade rose water for extra flavor, and that extra citrus really complemented the olive oil flavor well. This Tunisian olive oil is rich and grassy — it was really perfect for baking an olive oil cake. Now, my search for the perfect olive oil cake is complete! I won’t be looking for another one again. In the future, I may vary this up by adding a mix of orange and lemon zest, or maybe a couple teaspoons of freshly squeezed lemon or orange juice. There are so many possibilities with this gorgeous cake.