Gluten Free Lemon Olive Oil Cake

Rich, moist, and delicious gluten-free lemon cake with luscious lemon cream cheese frosting. Naturally gluten-free using a combination of almond and coconut flour and sweetened with coconut palm sugar. 

For more citrus sweets, check out my Lemon Cream Cheese Cookies with Almond Flour.

Ingredients

• lemons
• almond flour
• coconut flour
• olive oil, eggs
• coconut palm sugar
• baking powder
• baking soda
• lemon extract
• and if you want to make the frosting – maple syrup and cream cheese

Go ahead and slice yourself a piece of this glorious citrus cake, it is packed full of lemon and almonds and the perfect amount of olive oil. If you haven’t used olive oil in a cake yet you are in for a treat! It adds a touch of grassy earthy goodness and a moist, yet dense, texture. This cake has so many good-for-you ingredients that we are going to pop it directly into the healthy cake category 🙂

Lemon desserts will always be my preference, especially in the summer when topped with bright sweet berries. This lemon olive oil cake is the perfect treat to cap off a warm summer night, and because it is gluten-free and just about every other dietary concern “friendly”, it is ideal for a party or a large crowd.

If you wanted to leave off the cream cheese frosting you could easily serve with a sprinkling of powdered sugar and a ton of fresh berries, but maybe then add a hefty scoop of ice cream on the side.

This cake is a remake from a lemon loaf cake recipe that I have made for years. The only difference in the recipe was changing it from a loaf cake to round cake pan and swapping out the original coconut oil for olive oil. I have been disliking the taste of coconut oil in baked goods lately and have also recently fallen madly in love with this olive oil cake from Maialino, a restaurant in NYC, which Jordan has made over a dozen times.

I thought grassy olive oil would be the perfect compliment to tart and sweet lemon cake, and oh man was I right!

Get ready for 100’s of olive oil centered desserts to grace the pages of this blog, ’cause this girl is hooked!

Expert Tips

• Use enough lemon ? There is nothing worse than a lemon cake that doesn’t scream lemon!
• Use a high-quality lemon extract to bump up the lemon flavor. I love the brand “Olive Nation”, just make sure you are using actual lemon extract and nothing that says “imitation” or “artificial”
• I love the texture of almond flour in this cake, it is slightly more dense than a traditional gluten-free flour, but plays nicely with the light lemon flavor.
• Use organic lemons. This recipe contains a TON of lemon zest. Lemon zest is obviously the most vulnerable part of the lemon exposed to pesticides and herbicides. If you are using a conventionally grown lemon you are basically zesting pesticides into your gorgeous cake.

There is something about this cake that is happy making. Lemon naturally brightens my mood, it’s sunny, it’s bright, it’s happiness in a flavor. It’s sipping an icy cold lemonade on a sun-drenched porch, it’s squeezing bright citrusy goodness over seasonal produce, it’s slowly stirring a rich lemony battery together and then pouring it into a waiting pink cake pan (I did just recently buy a pink cake pan because… pink cake pan!), it’s zesting so many lemons until the small lemon shards cover your countertop and your entire kitchen smells like a dream. Lemon cake is summer and happiness, and deliciousness and I can’t wait for you to make it.

For more tasty dishes like this one, check out my gluten-free baking recipes, Spring recipes, Easter brunch recipes and Mother’s Day Brunch recipes roundups!