A good friend of mine recently made a lemon basil tea cake, and I was completely obsessed! The combination of lemon and basil in a cake is a little unexpected, and it’s a great way to use up all that basil at the end of summer. I went through and made the recipe healthier by swapping out half the all-purpose flour for oat flour, cutting the sugar in half, and replacing processed sugar with raw honey.
This lemon basil tea cake doesn’t hit you in the face with basil, but instead offers small nuances of the herb. If you want to make a really basil forward cake, double the basil. It’s delicious both ways, but I found that people preferred slightly less basil flavor.
Lemon Basil Tea Cake Ingredients
- 1 tbsp finely grated lemon zest (from about 2 lemons)
- ¼ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
- ½ cup raw honey
- 1 tbsp finely chopped basil from about 4 large basil leaves
- 1 pinch of kosher salt
- ¾ cup plain Greek yogurt (I used 2% but use whatever you have)
- 2 large eggs
- ½ cup canola oil or sunflower seed oil (any flavorless oil will work here)
- ¾ cup all-purpose flour
- ¾ cup oat flour
- 2 ½ tsp baking powder
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Start by zesting your lemons. If you don’t have a microplane yet, I highly suggest adding that to your arsenal of kitchen tools. I use this for zesting citrus, grating fresh ginger and turmeric, and for grating fresh nutmeg. It gives a nice fine grate and works well for a lot of different recipes.
I used two lemons worth of juice and zest to get the tablespoon of lemon zest and ¼ cup of lemon juice.
Add the lemon zest, lemon juice, and raw honey to a bowl and mix well until the lemon juice and honey come together into a syrupy mixture. Next add in the basil and a pinch of salt and mix until everything is equally distributed. Next add in the yogurt, then the eggs one at a time and mix until the mixture is pretty smooth and there are no lumps of yogurt. Mix in the canola oil then set aside and work on the dry ingredients.
If you have store bought oat flour, use that, or you can just put ¾ cup of rolled oats in a food processor or blender and grind them down until they become the consistency of flour. This is what I do and it’s a lot less expensive than buying oat flour at the store.
Mix the flours and baking powder until everything is combined, then add to wet ingredients in three batches.
Line a loaf pan with parchment paper and spray with a little cooking spray to ensure that nothing sticks.
To ensure that the parchment paper doesn’t fall into the batter. I fold up some tin foil and fold it over the edges to secure the parchment paper. See picture below.
Pour the batter into a loaf pan and bake for 45-50 minutes (mine was perfect after 45 minutes) until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve this lemon basil tea cake warm or at room temperature. This will keep for about a week in an airtight container or wrapped in tin foil and plastic wrap.
If you don’t want to use all of it at once, slice the lemon basil tea cake and freeze. You can then keep the frozen cake and pop a slice into the toaster when you want a piece.
