I can't believe it's not got butter!

Baking. I understand from sources back in the Old Country that baking has replaced football, moaning, queuing and ballroom dancing as the UK's most popular leisure activity. I've never seen an episode of The Great British Bake-off, but I believe it gets about four times the TV audience of Homeland, and features more mind games and disinformation than Carrie and colleagues at the CIA can summon. This is a worry. How can one feel safe when any BBC2-watching terrorist can make a convincing-looking suicide vest out of marzipan and royal icing? It's surely only a matter of time before Saul Berenson orders Mary Berry's extraordinary rendition to a black site in Tunisia.

Here in the Alpujarras, far removed from the subversive shenanigans of Berry, Hollywood et al, baking is a bit of a fringe activity. Most people here don't possess an oven. Home cooking is carried out on ancient equipment, like iron trivets over wood fires, butane gas burners and microwaves! Those who do own ovens are often little better off when attempting to produce a decent cake. A friend of mine recently decided to buy a new butane-fired cooker with a built-in oven. Working on a limited budget, the only model she could afford had the controllability of a garden barbecue: on, off and somewhere in the middle. The electric ovens easily available on the open market seem to be those work-top mini-ovens that have the baking capacity of a single sponge tin or a tray of 6 muffins.

Never mind. Baking still needs to be done. Often. Although the art of baking is something that most of my neighbours think is as esoteric as alchemy, they do like their cakes, even if they have to buy them. I make a decent amount of rolling-pin money making celebration cakes for saint's days and christenings.

One thing I have picked up from Spanish baking techniques however, is the use of olive oil as a shortening ingredient in place of butter or margarine. It's probably now very common knowledge in places where the gen. pop. has been drilled in the latest cooking techniques by wall-to-wall foodie TV, but it came as a bit of a shock to me. When I was learning the basics of home baking on Saturday afternoons in the 1970s, just before watching the TV wrestling, olive oil was something that only appeared on the rare occasion I needed wax removing from my ears.  The shortening Old Ma Blue used was Stork margarine, and nothing else!

So, what's the point of using olive oil? Don't you get weirdly-flavoured buns? Doesn't your pastry fall apart? Erm, no and no. Using olive oil in cakes makes them lighter and yet more moist. Anyone who's made a decent carrot cake will know this. Using it in pastry produces a texture that is much, much easier to work with than a butter-shortened, short crust recipe; it's much more like a hot water pastry to work with, and that's a big positive. The flavour that an extra virgin olive oil pastry gives to a savoury tart or quiche is outstanding. I've made it from a number of different recipes, but this is the one I've found works best.

It's in cakes that I think olive oil really makes its mark. You can use any kind of olive oil in your baking. A light oil is fairly taste-neutral and can be used for almost any kind of cake or bun. A strong, fruity EVOO will take a more leading role; you'll know you've used it. It gives a flavour that works perfectly in those recipes for grown-up, not-too-sweet cakes like a green olive and hazelnut cake I make occasionally. That recipe will appear here at some point, no doubt.

But what's the point of using olive oil in recipes where you don't want to taste it? Here of course it's the most traditional shortening ingredient, and it's cheap. Ordinary grade olive oil costs around a euro a litre, and even the best quality, locally-produced EVOO only costs €3,50 a litre. I dare say it's a bit pricier where most of you are. There are two other considerations though: olive oil is a healthier, less cholesterol-packed product. Cooking it doesn't turn it into a saturated trans-fat as some people believe; it's still the heart-healthy option. The other advantage is that olive oil baked goods keep longer because olive oil contains Vitamin E, which keeps things naturally fresher, for longer. The recipe I've posted below in fact tastes considerably better eaten a day or two after baking.

Andalublue's Pear Olive Oil Cake.

Many years ago a Dutch friend of mine made me an apple olive oil cake that I thought was outstanding. I've fiddled about with quantities and a couple of ingredients, and I've made this cake consistently for three years at Las Chimeneas. More people have asked me for this recipe than for any other cake or dessert I make. Here I'm using pears, but it's a like-for-like swap if you want to use apples; they work equally well.

Ingredients

• 120g Moscatel raisins
• 100ml sweet wine or sherry
• 200g golden granulated or 100g brown sugar/100g white sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 150ml extra virgin olive oil (the fruitier the better)
• 1tsp each of ground ginger, cinnamon, baking powder, and bicarb of soda
• 350g plain flour
• zest of 1 lemon
• 500g peeled and cubed pears (or apples, if you prefer)
• 1 tbs honey

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C (350F) normal oven/160C (320F) fan oven/gas mark 4/somewhere in the middle if you have a crap Spanish oven.

1. Soak the raisins in the sweet wine for 20 minutes before starting.
2. Crack the eggs into the sugar and whisk until they double in volume.
3. Gently warm the olive oil and then gradually whisk it into the sugar and eggs.
4. Sift together the ginger, cinnamon, baking powder, bicarb and flour and gradually fold it into the oil, eggs and sugar mixture. Add a pinch of salt, the zest of the lemon and the pears and mix well. The mixture will be very stiff when it's ready for the oven.
5. Use a 10"/26cm greased spring-form cake tin or a silicone mould and bake in the oven for 1 hour.
6. When a skewer comes out of the centre of the cake clean, it’s ready. Leave it for 5 mins then turn out onto a cooling rack.
7. Heat the honey slightly and then paint it over the top of the still warm cake.