Rick and I have been pondering Olive Oil Cake ever since we went to a special Harvest dinner last year at Lucca. The theme of the Harvest dinner was tomatoes and every dish had tomatoes in it. Dessert was olive oil cake with a tomatoe compote. It was delicious.
We’ve been looking for recipes and the Oregonian recently had an article about Olive Oil cakes in their food section. I tried the recipe by Danielle Pruett who is the pastry chef at Clyde Common. It turned out great. Very moist with a kind of sponge cake texture.
The cake needed something to complement it and with rhubarb in season, that was the obvious choice. Plus, I’m in love with rhubarb right now, just can’t get enough. To make the rhubarb compote, I chopped up 4 – 5 stalks into 1 inch pieces and put them in a saucepan with 1/4 cup water and 1/4 cup of sugar. Bring the heat to simmering and cook for about 10 minutes. The rhubarb should become all mushy with no hard pieces remaining. This time I added some minced candied ginger which gave it a nice extra punch.
Now you can add some compote on top of the olive oil cake and YUM YUM! Maybe a scoop of vanilla ice cream too.
