Olive oil cake with lemon and dried lavender

Edit: I made this cake using a round cake pan and the bake time is about 30-35 minutes. It also isn’t as rich and oily.

This morning I woke up and found outside lumpy ice sheets on the cars, streets and sidewalks. I wasn’t snowed in, I was iced in. I could hear neighbors scraping the sidewalk attempting to de-ice themselves.

On my way out the door to clear up my car, I was greeted by an invitation for a holiday party at a neighbor’s. I didn’t plan on stepping anywhere farther than 0.1 mile radius of my house so it’s nice to have somewhere to go tonight.

It also meant I needed to figure out a hostess gift! I googled around and looked at lists up to the third page of search results. DIY jams, gins, chocolate covered pretzels, cookies, etc. are not a DIY gift I’d like to receive and so one I won’t give either.

A few months ago a recipe for an olive oil cake came thru my Facebook feed. I saved the recipe to make for a dinner, and then thought this is the perfect edible gift to bake and bring tonight. It also didn’t hurt that I had all of the ingredients in my pantry and had no need to brave it out in the icy slush.

The recipe I followed is from Plate and Pencil blog. The only modifications I made were: adding dried, culinary lavender; using a 9″x5″ rectangular loaf pan; increasing the bake time by 20 or so minutes until the cake was firm and had a nice color.

Adding the olive oil looks like a goopy mess, but it mixes in to make a super custardy and smooth batter. I used an EVOO from Wegmans.

A better picture of the custardy batter as I was adding lavender.

The batter in my loaf pan. Because I didn’t use a 9″ cake pan, this increased the bake time by 20 minutes.

I hope this cake tastes as good as it smelled while it was baking!

The finished cake with a beautiful golden hue cooling.