Olive Oil and Sweet Wine Cake

Continuing in the theme of cooking with oil during Hanukkah, I decided to make an olive oil-based cake, flavoured with a sweet wine and a citrus zest. The recipe (which I can’t find an online copy of) is from one of my favourite cookbooks, In The Sweet Kitchen.

The cake uses both light and extra-virgin olive oil. For the former, I used Bertolli, and for the latter, Terra Delyssa, a Costco EVOO from Tunisia. The “sweet” wine I used was technically an off-dry apricot wine from Kawartha Country Wines.

This recipe is like a chiffon cake, in that the eggs are separated, and the whipped whites folded into the cake batter at the end. The finished cake didn’t brown very much, and was very moist and a little dense. The olive oil, lemon and orange zest flavours were quite pronounced, but I didn’t detect very much from the wine. I’d make this again, with a sweeter wine.