Apricot Olive Oil Cake (Dear Joe, I'm glad you found it)

a foil to ramped-up spring

Dear Joe

I’ve had this recipe written in my notebook for a long time. I came back to it this week after Mum had left a tower of apricots like a bowl of blushing cheeks for me on the kitchen counter. I’d forgotten how pleasingly delicate and damp this cake was; it’s cool, a foil to ramped-up spring. Apricots and olive oil are a yin-yang duo, mostly down to the way olive oil carries apricots' citrus notes, and in this cake, zing (apricots) and earth (olive oil) sit side by side, holding hands, probably blushing.

I had to do a bit of scrounging around my cupboards to make this. I didn’t have enough polenta, I didn’t have the apricot jam I’d asked for in my original recipe, or enough milk, but that was no problem; it made a perfect cake. And because I am a cook always consumed by my most recent memory, and because I am too attached to the version of this recipe without apricot jam, I’m going to share with you the version I made this week. The only thing I will say - you must not skip the fine polenta; it’s crucial to the cake, adding texture when you’d least expect it. Now go and get yourself a bowl of apricots and make this cake. Eating it says ‘you are home, here is a quiet place, I’m glad you found it’.

Preheat the oven to 180/160 fan. Grease and line a 9-inch tin. For this cake, you need 300g of apricots, weighed with stones removed. Cut the apricots into rough chunks of about 2 inches, and add to a saucepan with 50g water, 50g caster sugar, and the juice of half a lemon. Bring the mixture to a boil, then simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring to mash the apricots up a bit. When the apricots are jammy and a bit soft, take off the heat and allow to cool. In a large bowl, combine 120g ground almonds, 30g fine polenta (fine corn meal), 75g plain flour, half a tsp baking powder and 180g caster sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together 100g olive oil, 100g milk, ½ tsp vanilla extract, and 2 medium eggs. Pour the wet into the dry and whisk to form a liquid batter. Tip the batter into the prepared tin, dot with the cooked apricots, swirl them into the batter with a butter knife, then bake the cake for roughly 25 minutes.

Love, Caitlin x