We have a new family that has moved onto our block of Delaware Street in East Lawrence. So, in the interest of being neighborly I decided to bake something for them. I mean, I do have more time now and these are just the kinds of things that I struggled to do when working at our home restaurant Krause Dining.

Being in the habit of multi-tasking, I decide I can kill two birds with one stone – be a good neighbor and practice my recipes for our upcoming cookbook photo shoot. But what could be appropriate to drop off as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood treat from our cookbook, and preferably one that is on the ‘shot list’ for the photo shoot?

I strike out on finding something from the manuscript that is also on the ‘shot list’ but I do locate a great recipe for a pound cake that would make a great gift. Our cookbook is about flavors, how to combine them and different ways to apply cooking techniques to them. Each recipe features three flavors and the one for this pound cake is “Olive Oil, Citrus, Wine”. This is a unique pound cake in that it has no butter, but uses olive oil as the fat in the cake, as is more typical in Italian baking. I find a Beringer botrytised dessert wine that would complement the orange and lemon zests used and get to work.

Boy, it is easier baking one cake cake than two desserts each for thirty people. And the clean up is a breeze. But since I do have hungry mouths to feed around here, instead of baking it in a bundt pan as I suggest in the recipe, I separate the batter into two small loaf pans – one for our neighbors, one for us. It was beautiful (I suppose I should have taken a photo, that’s what people do in blogs don’t they?) and more  importantly, it was delicious. Not overly sweet or heavy as some pound cakes can be, but substantial and complex with the fruity olive oil undertones and the citrus notes. Yummy with a smear of cream cheese or butter.

I hope our nieghbors enjoyed it, but I may have enjoyed it more – a stress free cooking project that I got to eat! Recipe available soon in our cookbook 🙂