Recipe: pear, cherry and cardamom cake

Brown sugar sponges with an olive oil swiss meringue buttercream

I don’t know why it had never occured to me to use olive oil in buttercream before now. I love making cakes, but I don’t especially love eating them–delicious, sure, but if given the option between a slice of cake, a laminated pastry or an enriched dough-based pastry, I would very rarely choose the former. I think this is in part due to my thinking that of all of these things, a cake is the thing that I could most easily make myself, but also largely due to finding buttercream, more often than not, incredibly sweet and one-tone. The olive oil in this buttercream not only encourages the most luxuriously silky, velvety texture but it provides a slightly savoury, bitter understone that counteracts the sweetness of the buttercream. Moreover, the combination of olive oil and vanilla is a heavenly one.

The sponges are incredibly tender due to the use of light brown sugar as opposed to standard white sugar, and are fragrant with the flavours of cardamom and lemon zest. they are studded with pieces of ripe pear and cherries (I used frozen) before baking, and then layered with the buttercream and some thawed (or fresh, if in season) cherries. It is a cake of many textures and flavours, and one that I will be making again very soon.

***there are options for the decorating of this cake–either simply spreading buttercream between the sponges and on top and calling it a day, or going through the process of crumb coating the cake, then applying another layer of buttercream and finishing by piping more buttercream. the latter is more decorative, perhaps appropriate for a celebration cake (or if like me, you just want to be creative and play with all of your piping nozzles). in the ingredients for the buttercream, I have quantities in brackets which indicate the amounts required if you plan to go the crumb coat and piping route.