Loli, loli, loli… It is a lovely word that makes us think about a lolly, a lollipop. But, this is Loli (pronounced loh-lee) a cake from the island of Sifnos. Sifnos is an island between Athens and Rhodes, and may be known for being the centre of the foods and flavours made famous by Nikos Tselemendes (wrote the first complete modern Greek cook book). There are several dishes that put Sifnos on the map, including many dishes with Revithia (chick peas). Now, we are going to help to put one more dish from Syfnos on the list of notable dishes. Loli Cake.
First of all, a short linguistic lesson: the word loli (λωλή) is a Greek word meaning "Crazy" or "Crazy One".
When you read the list of ingredients, you may not think this would be much like a cake, but surprisingly, it is a moist, sweet treat. One of the motivating factors to making this cake was the fact that we had butternut squash in the freezer. Often, when we have an abundance of produce from the garden or from a shopping spree, we will cut and freeze the excess, to use at other times. And, today we were quite pleased to find butternut squash in our freezer. If you don't have squash in the freezer, pumpkin would would be a good substitute. In fact, we have (in the past) seen frozen diced squash and frozen diced pumpkin in a few specialty grocery stores. Canned pumpkin may or may not work in this recipe, but we have not tried that yet, so you may have to let us know how that works.
The Loli cake is full of fruit and sweetness. It is perfect with a hot tea. And, it takes only five minutes to put everything in a mixing bowl, and an hour to bake in the oven. Even if you make this the same day that you have company, you won't miss out on any of the time together. Really, you don't even need the icing on the cake!
For this recipe, you will need the following:
1 pound squash or pumpkin, diced small
zest of 1 orange
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup sugar
2-3 TBSP brandy or flavouring
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 TBSP honey
1 cup raisins
approximately 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup sesame seeds, divided in two parts
Preheat the oven to 350° F (about 175º C), and prepare the baking pan. You need to grease the pan very well. There is not a lot of fat in this cake, and it will stick to the sides of the pan, so grease the pan very well!
Now, we can prepare our cake batter. It's easy. Put all the ingredients, but only one part of the sesame seeds in one bowl and mix. Reserve the second portion of sesame seeds for the topping. Because we often have two separate bowls for mixing batters, one for wet ingredients, one for dry, by force of habit, we put the dry ingredients in the bowl and mixed them to make sure they were well incorporated with each other. Then, we added the wet ingredients and mixed again.
We found that it is more of a folding process since there are many components to combine. And, you want to make sure that all the dry ingredients are fully incorporated, and that all the squash and raisins are fully coated. The nice part about this cake is that there is very little flour, so it seems difficult to over-mix. By now, we all know that the more you mix, the more gluten is built, which means the chewier and tougher a baked product will be. But, with this cake, over mixing seemed probable, and acceptable at the same time.
Once the ingredients are mixed together, put the mix into the baking pan. This mixture will be a thick batter, closer to a very soft cookie dough in texture. It is important that you smooth the top and make it even all over the pan. There is very little leavening in this cake, so you have to make it the top smooth all by yourself. Then, sprinkle the remaining sesame seeds on top.
Bake this cake at 350° F (about 175º C) for 60-75 minutes until it is firm and solid in the middle. Allow it to cool completely before cutting it. Once the cake is cool, flip it out of the pan onto one plate, then put the serving plate under the cake and flip the cake back over so it ends up o the serving plate. Then, cut and enjoy. And, know that if someone tells you that they don't like squash, that person will not know that there is squash in the cake unless you tell!
"Give thanks to God, because He is good; His love is eternal."
No comments:
Post a Comment