This lemon olive oil loaf cake recipe is one of my favorite simple recipes to make. It’s perfect for anytime of year and is super light, fluffy and delicious. The key to making it super fluffy is to beat the mixture thoroughly so if you have either an electric hand mixer or a stand mixer, you’ll want to grab that! You can, of course, use your hand but it’s just a bit more work.

If you love olive oil cakes but don’t love lemon as much or just want to try something new, feel free to swap out the lemon juice for vanilla extract in this recipe. Additionally, you could use a flavored yogurt in place of the plain yogurt. However, I would avoid adding one that has chunks of fruit or other toppings in it as it might effect the consistency.

What does olive oil cake taste like?

A lot of people wonder what the taste of an olive oil cake is as sometimes olive oil can be super subtle and other times super poignant. The answer to that is it depends on what olive oil you’re using. I love using this one as the flavor is right in the middle of subtle and pronounced. To me, it makes the perfect olive oil cake. Plus it looks gorgeous on a counter! Overall, olive oil cakes are super light and tend to have a bit of a lemon-y flavor due to the added lemon.

Another swap you could do is to make this as a true cake instead of a loaf. In that case, you’d want to use half the batter in a circular baking dish. You also could use a sheet cake pan and pour the entire thing of batter in at one time. I love that this dish makes two loaves though as it’s so fun to share with a friend or neighbor, bring to a gathering or just freeze one for later. Also, no judgement whatsoever if you have both at the same time. I’ve done that a time or two myself. FYI, if you do make it as one sheet pan or in a circular cake dish, you’ll need to adjust the baking time. I recommend baking it for 20 minutes and then checking every 5-10 minutes until it looks nice and golden brown on top. From there, insert a toothpick and see if it comes out clean. If it does, it’s done and if it doesn’t bake another 5 minutes or until the toothpick does come out clean.

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