Walnut Cake with Mastic (p. 457)

I've never cooked with mastic before, and it took me a little while to track down. It's the resin of a bush and looks like crystal meth. (I've been watching a lot of Breaking Bad, otherwise I would have no clue what meth looks like.)

I finally found this at local restaurant/grocery store Neomonde, so it was time to make this cake to bring to a 4th of July cookout

The first step is to make a mastic-flavored olive oil, which is simply crushed mastic rocks dissolved into olive oil. I cooked them in a sauté pan for just a few minutes, until the mastic had disappeared, and then set it aside to cool.

Then it's just regular types of cake ingredients -- baking soda, baking powder, flour, and salt are mixed together for the dry ingredients, and eggs are separated for the wet. The egg yolks are beaten with some sugar before adding in the mastic flavored oil as well as plain yogurt. The egg whites are beaten until super fluffy, and more sugar is added in with this. Fold all the wet and dry ingredients together, as well as very finely chopped (actually, I used my food processor for this step) toasted walnuts.  

The dough comes together looking incredibly fluffy and delicious.

Pour all the batter into a lightly greased and floured cake pan and cook for about an hour.

Mine came out looking beautiful but fell once I turned away for a moment. Luckily, blueberries and powdered sugar can make anything pretty.

And whipped cream helps, too!  

This was light and tasty, and really more like a sweetened bread than a cake. My friend Sarah likened it to banana bread without the bananas, but in a good way. It's a nice healthy-tasting dessert variety.

mastic -- $5.99

yogurt -- $1.67

eggs -- $1.79 (with half left)

walnuts -- $6.99 (with about 3/4 of the bag remaining)

Total Cost of Walnut Cake with Mastic: $16.44

($1.37 per serving)