The Only Thing You Need To Bring To A Picnic This Summer Is An Olive Oil Cake

As tempting as it may be to make an impressively frosted cake, a Basque cheesecake (it feels like everyone I know has baked one of these recently, and every restaurant I go to in New York City has their own spin on one on their dessert menu), or some sort of salad to bring to a picnic this summer, rethink these options. Your buttercream frosting will slide right off the cake in the summer heat. Cheesecake on a hot day with no option for refrigeration seems ill-conceived. Nobody will touch your salad no matter how good it is because it’s still a salad. Instead, consider an alternative crowd pleaser: an olive oil cake.

The first time I remember having an olive oil cake as an adult was at Maialino, the Italian restaurant inside the Gramercy Park Hotel. I was 22, very nervously doing a new job (which consisted in no small part of being thrust into a world of meeting people who had lots of money and ran companies or advised companies and asking them how they did those things and then writing them down and, if they were really interesting or newsworthy, publishing them) and, relatedly, taking a lot of coffee meetings at Maialino, which was at the time somehow both in proximity to my then-office and also in proximity to every VC-backed software startup’s office.

This particular day was one of the first 70-degree, unambiguously springlike days of the year; the sun had melted the rest of the lingering snow weeks prior, ambitious green grassy patches had started popping up, trees were just starting to bloom. I was getting ready to move out of the apartment in Ridgewood I shared with my boyfriend and also bring to an end our almost-five year relationship. I was truthfully not really prepared or in the right headspace to interview the CEO who suggested meeting on this day at Maialino but I showed up with a notepad and my list of questions, and though I usually declined any offer to get something off the menu because I didn’t want to feel like I owed anything to anyone, even a $6 latte, I followed the lead of the VC and ordered a slice of the olive oil cake. What I began to pick at I ended up devouring in a matter of minutes. I went back to my office after our meeting and thought about the cake all day — it was impossibly aromatic, light and delicate inside and crackly-crusty outside, a perfect dessert. I went back the next day and brought a friend for breakfast and had another slice. Then, because I was not made of money, I learned how to make it…