Easy and fast low sugar orange olive oil cake.

I made these darlings today, after more than an hour of search high and low all over the Internet.

Because I was bored out of my wits. And the 34 degrees Celsius out there wasn't helping. I dreaded to pass the few hours in the afternoon.

Recipe was adapted from Food Network's Orange Olive Oil Cake. Mine didn't turn out looking anything like the olive oil cake in their picture, which looks deliciously heavenly judging by the fluffy and smooth texture.

The cake bakes fast so if you don't have much time to spare, an hour is sufficient to make this large cake.

Like my previous recipes of the past few months, I used molasses sugar in place of table sugar. I didn't have enough so I compensated with some granulated sugar. The molasses sugar gave the batter an irresistible caramel-like appearance, and the cake came out in a dark orange tone.

I followed some advice in the reviews and used more juice than it was called for. I used self-raising flour to prevent the cake from turning out too flat. Baked the cake for 20 minutes tops!

Orange Olive Oil Cake (makes 16 squares)

100 g all-purpose flour

56 g self-raising flour

100 g sugar (I used 65 g molasses with 35 g granulated sugar)

2 eggs

66 g olive oil

1 tsp vanilla essence

Juice of 2 oranges

Zest of 1 orange, grated

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt*

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Flour a square cake pan.
2. Beat sugars and eggs until blended and has a lighter colour (it only lightened up a little for my case as I used molasses sugar).
3. Beat in oil and vanilla essence until combined.
4. Beat in juice and zest.
5. In another bowl, sift together all the flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
6. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet mixture in 2 batches.
7. Pour mixture into the cake pan and bake for 20 minutes.

*I don't think salt does any work in this cake as it didn't really bring out much flavour. Maybe it's because my salt wasn't fine enough. Follow your instinct.

I watched the cake closely throughout the baking.
Here are some of my inspections:
5 minutes into baking, the cake started to smell of oranges, and it's already drying out;
10 minutes into baking, small cracks had become visible on top of the cake;
then, cracks became larger and the cake continued to dry out, so I turned down the heat to 150;
20 minutes into baking, the cake was already cooked through, as you can judge, it's already very dry.