Wonderful food, a warm welcome and a beautiful location.

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines is a delicious cake to have in your repertoire and this week’s #woodfiredweekly. Easy to get together, it uses up the falling heat in your woodfired oven and you can use whatever soft fruit or stone fruit are in season. Overloaded on apricots or peaches? Put them in the cake. Picked a few too many blackberries? Put them in the cake.

Don’t worry about using a mild olive oil either. We use the one we import from Mairena where we take our foodie groups to the Spanish Alpujarras. It’s full flavoured, robust and packed with green pepperiness but the cake comes out perfectly – no overwhelming flavour of olive oil at all. Do give it a go – here’s what we did.

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines – Ingredients

275g caster sugar

275g self raising flour

90g almonds, toasted in the oven and chopped up

90g dark chocolate, cut into small pieces (we used chips so didn’t have to chop it)

3 free range eggs

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines

Fabulous free range eggs

120ml olive oil

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

3 ripe nectarines, stoned and sliced

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines – Oven State

5 Mississippi

Door On

Loose bottomed cake tin about 25cm in diameter and lined with baking parchment

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines – Method

  1. Whisk together the eggs and oil in a jug.
  2. Put all the dry ingredients including the chopped toasted almonds and the chocolate in a large bowl.
  3. Add the oil mixture and the vanilla extract and mix everything together.
  4. Stir in the nectarine slices.
  5. Turn the cake mixture into the cake tin using a flexible spatula to get it all out.
  6. Put the cake tin in the oven and put on the door.
  7. Bake for around 40-45 minutes until an inserted skewer comes out clean and the top of the cake is golden brown.
  8. Put the tin on a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes before taking the cake out of the tin.
  9. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or at room temperature with creme fraiche and maybe some baked nectarines – cooked in the woodfired oven of course!

    Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines

    The finished cake

Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines – Alternatives

  • Vary the stone fruits – use peaches, apricots or plums in season.
  • Add berries to the mix – use strawberries, raspberries, blackberries or blueberries. Take out one of the nectarines and use the equivalent weight in berries.
  • Use white chocolate instead of dark.
  • Change the almonds for hazelnuts or walnuts or macadamias or pecans. Or leave them out!

    Woodfired Olive Oil Cake with Nectarines

    Add some berries if you like