Pine Nut, Almond and Lemon Cake

We're fast approaching the date when CT will be moving out. This might be the last time I bake a  'low saturated fat' cake with his dietary requirements in mind (although I suspect I will still be baking him things to take back home when he visits!). Next weekend it will be something celebratory - lots of butter and chocolate - but for now, I'm delighted to have found another recipe that works well with oil. In this case I actually substituted oil for the melted butter used in this recipe for Pine Nut, Almond and Lemon Cake - this hasn't always worked well in the past, but it was fine this time.

In place of the 250g melted butter, I used 200mls of sunflower oil and an extra 50mls buttermilk; I didn't have 100g of ground almonds, so I used 50g of almonds, 50g polenta and a few drops of almond extract. Apart from these two changes I followed the recipe exactly. It was a really simple recipe to follow - mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the wet ingredients, and the cake was baked in the time given.

I was pleased with the amount of rise, although the texture had more holes than I like to see. The flavour was really delicate, with the pine nuts adding both a crunch to the texture and something extra to the flavour. This was one cake where using a flavourful extra virgin olive oil might have been an improvement over sunflower oil.

So, once again my baking is entering a new phase - FB has quite different tastes to CT - she doesn't really like ginger, prefers me not to bake with nuts other than almonds or hazelnuts, but does like fresh fruit more than CT. Watch this space!