This Monday’s Thug Kitchen recipe was such a good one. It is an almond cake with a delicious peach caramel. This may be my favourite dessert from this cookbook to date.

Let’s start with the cake. When you think of an almond cake, you expect it to be made of almond flour/ground almonds or at least have sliced almonds on top. But this cake had none of those things. The almond here came from extract. I love almond extract because it has such a nice floral and fruity flavour. The batter has 2 tsp of extract which seems like a lot but it was perfect here. Obviously if you do not like the flavour of almond extract, you may not enjoy this cake, but I loved it.

The fruity flavour of the cake was even more prevalent because of the use of olive oil in the batter. It’s not too common to use olive oil in baking but it worked really well here. The oil, along with some homemade buttermilk, also helped to keep the cake super moist and soft. Of course I served mine with the peach caramel, but it would be equally moist enough without it, if you didn’t want to go the extra step.

The last thing I love about the cake is that I used half white and half whole wheat flour. The whole wheat gives a little extra nutrition and you can feel better about having a slice (or two). When I make this cake again, I’ll see if it turns out well using 100% whole wheat flour – that would make it even healthier!

Now let’s get to the caramel. So it starts as a regular caramel with sugar and water, plus a little vanilla. That cooks down until it’s super bubbly and turning golden brown. Then you add in a fresh peach puree (I used local Ontario peaches) which transforms it into such a beautiful sauce. This sauce would be good on some yogurt or ice cream too.

Yes, the cake and sauce were great on their own, but together, it becomes such a divine dessert. You get the fruity peach with the fruity almond extract in the cake and they work so well together. This was perfectly sweet, not too much sugar at all. I really enjoyed this recipe!