Greek Olive Oil and Honey Cake with Walnuts and Figs: A Taste of the Mediterranean

The Story Behind the Cake

I remember working in the kitchen at home one day when I was younger and still lived with my mom, watching Giada de Laurentiis add olive oil to a muffin or cupcake recipe. I was astounded in the best way—it opened up a whole new world of baking for me. Until that moment, I’d only thought of olive oil as something for savory cooking, for sautéing vegetables or making vinaigrettes. The idea that you could use it in something sweet, something tender and delicate like a cake, felt almost revolutionary.

But of course, it wasn’t revolutionary at all. Mediterranean bakers have been using olive oil in their sweets for thousands of years. What was revolutionary was my own understanding, the sudden recognition that the boundaries I’d drawn around ingredients were arbitrary, that olive oil could be just as at home in a cake as butter could be in a pasta sauce. Once I started experimenting with olive oil in baking, I couldn’t stop. I’ve used it in cakes for some time now, when appropriate, and I’ve come to love what it brings to the table—literally.

Why Olive Oil Works So Beautifully in Baking

Olive oil makes cakes taste better and it’s healthier than many alternatives. Where butter can make a cake rich and dense, olive oil creates something altogether different—a crumb that’s impossibly moist and tender, almost creamy in texture, with a lightness that seems to defy the amount of fat involved. The cake stays fresh longer because olive oil doesn’t solidify the way butter does when it cools. You can pull a slice from the refrigerator days later and it will still feel soft and giving, not firm or dry.

And then there’s the flavor. A good olive oil doesn’t taste aggressively of olives in a finished cake—instead, it adds a subtle fruitiness, a complexity that makes you take a second bite trying to figure out what makes the cake taste so interesting, so alive. It’s particularly beautiful with citrus, with honey, with warm spices—all the flavors that appear in Mediterranean baking traditions. The oil carries these flavors in a way that feels both rich and light at the same time.

I use olive oil in my baking when the recipe calls for something with character, when I want that moisture and tenderness, and when the other flavors in the cake can dance with olive oil’s fruity notes rather than fight against them. For a delicate vanilla cake where you want pure, simple sweetness, butter might be the better choice. But for something like this Greek honey cake, with its bold ingredients and warm spices, olive oil isn’t just appropriate—it’s essential. If you’d like to learn more about choosing the right olive oil for baking and cooking, we have a comprehensive guide to olive oil that covers everything from production methods to regional characteristics.

The Greek Tradition

This cake draws inspiration from traditional Greek sweets like ravani and karydopita (walnut cake), but it’s designed to showcase the ingredients that have sustained Mediterranean communities for centuries. Olive oil cakes have been made in Greece for as long as people have been pressing olives—they’re economical, keeping for days without refrigeration, and they celebrate the very best of what the land offers.

The combination of honey, walnuts, and figs isn’t just delicious; it’s deeply rooted in Greek history. Walnuts have grown in Greek groves since ancient times, their trees dotting the hillsides alongside the olives. Figs were sacred to the ancient Greeks, associated with Dionysus and considered a gift from the gods. Honey was the primary sweetener before sugar became widely available, collected from wild bees and, later, from carefully tended hives. These weren’t luxury ingredients—they were everyday staples, what people had on hand, what they could grow or forage or trade for in the village square.

Greek yogurt, too, has been a cornerstone of Greek cuisine for millennia. Its tang balances sweetness beautifully, and its acidity helps create a tender crumb in baking. Using it in this cake isn’t just about flavor—it’s about honoring a tradition of using what’s available, what’s local, what’s been proven over generations to work beautifully together.

A Personal Connection

My husband Peter grew up in Messini, Greece, just outside of Kalamata. His family had olive fields there, and even though he came to America when he was ten years old, those early memories stayed with him—the feel of the groves, the rhythm of harvest time, the taste of his mother’s cooking made with oil pressed from their own trees. This cake, in some small way, is a bridge between his childhood in Greece and the life we’ve built together here.

When I started working with olive oil in my baking, it felt like I was tapping into something larger than just a cooking technique. I was connecting to the same traditions that Peter’s grandmother would have known, the same combinations of flavors that have sustained families through centuries. The honey-soaked cakes, the walnuts pressed into sweet dough, the ever-present olive oil—these aren’t just recipes. They’re a form of cultural memory, a way of saying “this is who we are, this is what we value, this is how we show love.”

The Beauty of Simplicity

What makes this cake particularly Greek is its restraint. There’s no heavy frosting, no elaborate decoration, no attempt to be something it’s not. The beauty comes from the quality of the ingredients and the balance of flavors—the olive oil’s fruitiness, the honey’s floral notes, the walnuts’ earthiness, the figs’ jammy sweetness, the yogurt’s gentle tang, all tied together with warm spices and bright orange zest. It’s the kind of cake that makes you slow down, that invites conversation over coffee, that connects you to generations of home bakers who understood that sometimes the simplest things are the most satisfying.

The toasted walnuts scattered over the honey-glazed top aren’t there to impress anyone—they’re there because that’s what makes sense, what tastes good, what echoes the walnuts baked into the cake itself. The honey drizzle isn’t an Instagram-worthy cascade of glaze; it’s a traditional syrup that soaks into the warm cake, making it impossibly moist and adding that characteristic sheen that marks so many Greek sweets.

This is the kind of baking I love—where you can taste the care and the history in every bite, where the ingredients speak for themselves, where you’re not trying to prove anything or follow trends, but simply making something good and true and worth sharing. It’s what drew me to use olive oil in my baking in the first place, that sense that I was working with something authentic, something with roots that go deeper than any cookbook.

Making It Your Own

While this cake honors Greek tradition, it’s also an invitation to make it part of your own kitchen story. Maybe you’ll make it for a special occasion, or maybe it will become a regular appearance at your weekend table. Maybe you’ll adjust the spices to your taste, or experiment with different types of honey, or try it with dates instead of figs. That’s the beauty of recipes like this—they’re flexible, forgiving, meant to be adapted to what you have and what you love.

What I hope stays constant is the use of good olive oil. That’s the thread that connects this cake to its origins, that makes it taste distinctly Mediterranean, that brings all those health benefits along with the flavor. Every time I use olive oil in my baking, I think back to that moment in my mom’s kitchen, watching Giada and having my mind opened to new possibilities. It’s a reminder that cooking is always about learning, always about discovering that the boundaries we thought were fixed are actually quite flexible, always about being willing to try something that at first seems surprising but turns out to be exactly right.

Serve this cake with strong Greek coffee or a glass of sweet wine, and you’ll understand why these flavors have endured for thousands of years. They belong together. They taste like sunshine and stone walls, like olive groves and island breezes, like the careful work of generations of bakers who knew that good ingredients, treated with respect, will always reward you. They taste, quite simply, like home—whether that home is in Messini or in your own kitchen, wherever you are.