A blog about the Primal Blueprint diet and lifestyle
My kitchen is a mess. I dont mean messy, I mean it has too much of too many types of food in it. It looks like three different families just stopped by and dropped off their weekly groceries. Im trying to remain calm about it. “Itll all work out,” I say to myself. Ill just make some big soups”. But in fact it all has me a little nervous and confused.
First off, this is the time of year that my farm share really kicks into high gear, which is always a little nerve wracking. This week I came home with, among many, many other things, six red bell peppers, a sack of chard that could smother an infant, and five pound of green beans. Add to this the groceries from my near daily trips to the store to buy bits of this and that for the primal cookbook Ive been working on. Keeping the right kind of food around for the cookbook is a challenge all on its own. Some recipes end with ingredients leftover, others are still waiting for a single ingredient I forgot. Still others need more work (and another trip to the store. Finally, for some reason I can no longer recall, we decided to grow a garden. Yesterday I counted 12 cucumbers and more cherry tomatoes than I could eat in a year.
The kitchen chaos and my desire to create meals using up what we have on hand has led me to contemplate some food and flavor combinations I might not have thought of otherwise. These are the thoughts that plague me:
How would coconut milk work in a tomato soup
Avocado with almond butter: delicious or disgusting
Lime with roasted beets And curry
Primal Rosemary Olive Oil Cake
It is in this spirit that I introduce to you the rosemary olive oil cake. I ran across the original recipe for this cake at 101 cookbooks some time back and was intrigued by the idea of using rosemary and olive oil in a cake, especially a cake that has big chunks of chocolate. The end product is sort of what youd imagine: a little bit strange and a little bit wonderful.
I adapted the cake to use almond flour. Unfortunately, I opted to use the almond meal from Trader Joes (which includes the skin of the almond instead of almond flour from blanched almonds. While tasting fine, the cake turned out very dark which means you couldnt see the flecks of rosemary or even the chocolate very well. I recommend making the cake with a lighter flour for maximum effect.
2 cups almond flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
cup olive oil
cup honey
1 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
1/3 to cup of dark chocolate chunks or chips
Preheat oven to 300 degrees and either line a loaf pan with parchment paper or grease it well. Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl and set aside. In a second bowl mix the eggs with the olive oil and the honey. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix thoroughly. Fold in the rosemary and the chocolate. Spoon mixture into the loaf pan and bake for approximately 35 minutes (check your cake at 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
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Hey, glad to see you posting again!! I had come by here for a few recipes and thought maybe you had stopped blogging, but what a way to come back! This looks great!
Wow this looks lovely! I’ve seen olive oil cakes arounud the web, but haven’t tried one yet. Love your almond flour version!
Ok I am giving it a whirl with my 6 yr old helping me…will fill you in how mine turned out, if it fell or not. I did only have the flour with the skins included, so that is what I used….smells amazing!! And I bet the kids are gonna love this in their lunch tomorrow. The fun thing is they don’t know how to explain this kind of food to their peers yet:)
Can I use almond meal (ground in my food processor) instead of almond flour. Almond flour is hard to get where I live, and ordering on-line is very expensive. I’m also into a frugal lifestyle and try and cut out unnecessary products and expenses. Thanks for your help.
Hi Margaret, Yes, feel free to grind your own almonds for any recipe you see that calls for almond flour. It will probably be even better!
Where can I find almond flour?
As well as almond butter?
Hi Tiffany, You can buy both at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods if you have either of those in your area. Health food stores will typically have almond butter. Bob’s Red Mill makes almond flour and I just recently noticed that my small down-scale local supermarket carries it.
BIG fan of this recipe but haven’t made it since moving to central Oregon where the altitude is barely above 3600′- and WOW does altitude seem to affect this cake! Anyone successfully made adjustments for altitude on this one? (MASSIVE overflow and what remained wouldn’t bake – became more gummy than cake-like)