These might not be the most beautiful cakes you've seen come from the Noland-McEachern oven, but my God they're good. I've been on this "I should really use a recipe occasionally" kick and I chose, for my first, the orange juice and olive oil cake with pine nuts from Apples for Jam, a cookbook that is truly a delight to read and, it turns out, one that has at least one really amazing recipe.
The ingredient list contains only orange juice, olive oil, pine nuts, eggs, flour, sugar, and baking powder. The simplicity is very appealing. It's got a rusticky peasant feel, but with an awful lot of refinement. It was delicious. Sweet and subtle. I served it with vanilla Greek yogurt and a dollop of marmalade. It's going in the Permanent Record.
I can't say I followed the recipe to a T. A tee? Neither one. I always feel like there's a lot of room for interpretation in a sentence like "beat the yolks until sturdy." It's like taking multiple choice tests--if you think about it hard enough you can make a good argument for at least a couple of answers, generally. But I always managed to do okay on tests, and this cake turned out beautifully. Next time may be another story.
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I aim to visit not this coming weekend but the next. I would love to taste this cake. Orange juice! Yogurt! I will even help you make it -- in the sense that I usually "help" with the baking: drinking wine and doing the dishes afterwards.
ReplyDeleteOh, Lisa, dear. We will make you a cake and leave it for you; we will be in Spokane. Do you want to house sit or can you come another time?
ReplyDeleteOh! Maybe both...? Lemme consider.
ReplyDeleteDo you think maybe we should do our personal corresponding somewhere other than this blog? What if one day you are famous and all the crafters are reading the blog and they feel annoyed by friendship-related chatter which only about half the time pertains to the craft at hand? Or what if they use our highly personal correspondence to learn everything about us and start stalking us?
For the record, I ate this cake and it was fucking good.
ReplyDeleteI'm back in town, are you out of town? Lisa, are you coming to town. This is all slightly confusing.
I feel totally fine about personal correspondence here... If I ever become a famous crafter, the others will appreciate the intimacy, the organic development, the true domestic nature of our patter. I am stalking more than one crafter currently, but I think generally crafter-stalkers are harmless. I just do a double take when I see a pair of shoes I know x genius has, and wonder if it's her. Too shy to ask...
ReplyDelete