I have quite the sweet treat to share with y'all today.

Get ready to meet your new favorite dessert, olive oil cake with an orange syrup and an almond crumble.

I'm Lauren Furey and you're watching "Now We're Cookin'" ♪ Olive oil is often associated with savory dishes, but I'll let you in on a little secret.

Olive oil helps the cake stay moist longer than butter ever could.

Let's get started.

It's time to make our olive oil cake, and before we do any mixing, we got to get our pan ready for the cake.

First thing you want to do, always is take a baking sheet and line it with foil.

When you're using a springform pan, there's always a chance that some batter could escape out of the edges and the foil will catch it and make your life a whole lot easier.

So we want to take our spray here at a distance make sure you get all the sides, the bottom of our springform pan.

[spraying sound] Rotate it as you spray.

[spraying sound] As y'all can see, all the edges, the bottom, everything is well sprayed.

It'll be easier to take the cake out when it's time to eat it.

In this olive oil cake, we're going to start off measuring out our dry ingredients.

And there's not a whole lot of them, so, this cake is easy breezy.

It'll be ready in no time.

First, two cups of all purpose flour, a cup and three quarters of granulated sugar.

A teaspoon and a half of freshly chopped rosemary right from my garden.

That's the good stuff.

A half a teaspoon of baking soda.

Half a teaspoon of baking powder, and a teaspoon and a half of salt.

You don't need to add the salt; It's optional, but I highly recommend it.

♪ The sugar and the flour, it all clumps together So you want to use a whisk to be sure everything is evenly incorporated.

Now it's time to mix up our wet ingredients, but first, let's get our zest in the bowl.

So we have our lemon zest and orange zest.

When you combine the two, it's magic.

And the zest has a oil that really creates a whole other level of flavor outside of the juice.

We're looking for a teaspoon and a half each, one orange and one lemon.

I'm going to take our zest and put it into the bowl.

You can use your hands.

That's just fine.

I'll walk you through the wet ingredients here.

We have three eggs, two tablespoons of orange juice, fresh orange juice, that is, two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice, a quarter cup of orange liqueur, a little bit of vanilla extract, a teaspoon and a half.

And since this is an olive oil cake, we're going to add a whole lot of olive oil.

An important thing to know is that olive oil, depending on which type you use, I use an extra virgin olive oil, it has a strong flavor and I like to balance it out with some vegetable oil.

So, equal parts vegetable oil and olive oil create a well balanced cake.

So, we have two thirds cup of extra virgin olive oil every last drop, and two thirds cup of vegetable oil.

Last but not least, whole milk.

A lot of cakes use butter, however, olive oil cake helps ensure that this cake stays moist for a long enough time to share it with some friends.

The fun part, we're going to whisk it up.

[stirring sound] The vegetable oil in the milk are separate at first, but the more you keep whisking it, it all comes together.

So now we're going to pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and whisk it up once again.

This is where the whisk is really helpful because we're incorporating everything all together.

If you were to use a spoon, it'd be a little bit harder to do.

Now this cake, while it does take an hour to cook.

That's because it's very thick.

It has a lot of olive oil, all types of liquid in there, but you can also use two smaller pans.

Just adjust your cooking time accordingly.

You can see all the speckles of rosemary, orange zest, lemon zest.

Oh yeah.

This is a springform pan if you remember.

We want to take our spatula.

Be sure we got every last bit of dry ingredients out of here.

I've served this cake with ice cream before, but honestly, this cake is sweet enough on its own and we just want to let it be in the spotlight.

All right, so our olive oil cake is ready for the oven, but first, I'll show you a trick.

Since we have the foil on the bottom of the pan, that's great, but to ensure that it's definitely not going to spill everywhere, it's good to lift up the foil around the sides of the cake to keep everything nice and cozy.

You're kind of tucking it in before you go ahead and bake it.

That's that.

Time to stick it in the oven.

One of my all time favorite dessert toppings is an almond sugar crumble.

Whether you're using it on olive oil cake or a ice cream, it's a really versatile dessert topping that I know you'll love.

The ingredients are very simple, and there's only a few of them.

The first one is dry roasted almonds.

They have a lot of flavor.

Sometimes raw almonds are hard to blend.

The dry roasted almonds are just what we need for this recipe.

Granulated sugar, orange zest and rosemary.

The rosemary really takes this dish home.

So let's get into it.

First thing we're going to do is finely chop our rosemary.

It doesn't need to be perfect because we're putting it in the food processor anyway.

So right in there we're going to add half a cup of granulated sugar.

I'm going to add a quarter cup of our almonds to add the zest of one orange.

Guess what.

That's that.

[blending sound] As you cook, it's important to really look at what you're doing, what it smells like, and what it sounds like, even because it will teach you a lot more about cooking and the ingredients.

So this is a fine sand-like consistency, meaning it's easy to sprinkle.

It's easy to eat right off the spoon if you would like.

Use a rubber spatula to get the almond sugar out of the food processor.

It may look like a lot, but I'll promise you it doesn't last too long.

And that's that.

Almond sugar, good to go.

Here's how to make our syrup.

The first ingredient is a third of a cup of granulated sugar.

right in our pot Three tablespoons of water.

[water pouring sound] A tablespoon of local honey right from South Carolina.

The juice of half an orange.

[squeeze sound] A sprig of fresh rosemary from the garden.

And lastly, two strips of orange peel that you can peel with a vegetable peeler.

By adding in fresh orange peel, it also serves as a beautiful garnish for the top of our olive oil cake.

Now I'm going to take this mixture over the stove.

We're going to cook it over medium high heat until the sugar and honey dissolve, and the mixture reduces into a syrupy consistency.

The cake is fresh out the oven and it looks beautiful.

First thing we're going to do is poke the cake so all the syrup soaks in to this cake.

You want to evenly distribute these little holes here so that the syrup gets all over the cake.

Now, we're going to pour our syrup over the cake, and you don't need to use all of it, just enough.

You feel like the cake soaks it in.

A little bit of syrup goes a very long way.

Every bite of the cake matters and by adding the crumble, it ensures that we have a little bit of crunch, as well as the luscious cake.

One of my favorite things that I had in Sicily was almond granita, and it almost reminded me of water ice, a little bit creamier, but it was a few simple ingredients, almost like this crumble.

So now at this point, we're going to add on a little bit more crumble than we would think is enough.

And we're going to push it right into the top to make an even layer.

I made this with my mom once, and she wouldn't stop eating the crumble off the cake.

Thankfully, we made double.

Now, we're taking our caramelized orange slices and putting them right on top.

There you have it.

Our Sicilian olive oil cake is ready.

My friends are on their way over and they have been asking me about this olive oil cake all day.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Lauren Furey and see you next time on "Now We're Cookin'".

♪