Recipe: Spiced Orange Olive Oil Cake

Yes, those are unicorn salt and pepper shakers you see in the background.

Baking during snow days is kind of my thing, so the snow day last week was no exception. I had a bunch of clementines laying around, so I looked up recipes that included oranges. I found this recipe on AllRecipes.com. And I realize it looks like bread, not cake, but the recipe called for a loaf pan!

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons fresh orange zest

• 1 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 pinch salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 °F. Lightly oil and flour a loaf pan.
2. Beat eggs in a bowl until lightened in color. Add sugar, olive oil, orange zest, and five-spice powder and beat until smooth. Fold flour, baking powder, and salt into egg mixture until batter is just mixed. Pour batter into the prepared loaf pan.
3. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove cake from the pan and cool on a wire rack.

As usual, I changed some ingredients (this time more than usual). I didn't have any olive oil (my roommate had just used the last bit of it), so I used canola oil instead. And I had never heard of Chinese five-spice powder, so I went with all-spice (since that's already a mixture of spices, too). The zest did not work out: I discovered that clementines actually aren't that good for zesting because their skin is not as thick as that of a regular orange. So I substituted two teaspoons of orange juice for the zest.

I'm not sure if it's because of these changes, or something else, but my cake had a fishy smell to it. It didn't taste fishy, but the aroma was so strong that it's all I could think about while eating it. The online recipe did suggest toasting it and eating it with honey, or cutting the cake up into cubes and mixing them with whipped cream and oranges, so I tried both of those. The toasting with honey helps a little bit. but not much. But the latter idea definitely worked!

No more fishy smell! I made mine with Cool Whip and even added extra whipped cream...