Vasilopita is the cake with which the year begins in Greece. It is cut on 1 January, the feast of Saint Basil — and somewhere inside it there is a coin. Whoever finds it in their slice has the year on their side: not because money is coming, but because the whole house has decided it that way, with a knife and a plate.
There are two families of vasilopita: the sweetened yeast-bread cake that looks like a tsoureki and is obligatory in some houses, and the simpler sponge made with baking powder that most people bake today. This recipe is the second kind — with olive oil instead of butter, with orange, cinnamon and brandy, and it stays moist for days. The coin gets its own section below, because there are a few things you can get wrong there.
One 26 cm tin, about 12 slices. 25 minutes of work, 50 minutes in the oven.
| Amount | Ingredient |
|---|---|
| 4 | Eggs, room temperature |
| 180 g | Sugar |
| 200 ml | Extra virgin olive oil, mild |
| 200 ml | Orange juice, freshly squeezed |
| 2 | Organic oranges, zest only |
| 60 ml | Brandy or Metaxa |
| 400 g | Flour (type 405, plain flour) |
| 2 tsp | Baking powder |
| 1 tsp | Cinnamon, ground |
| ¼ tsp | Clove, ground |
| 1 tsp | Vanilla sugar |
| 1 pinch | Salt |
| — | Icing sugar, for dusting |
| 1 | Coin, washed and wrapped in foil |
On the oil: mild, not robust. An intense Koroneiki with a lot of bitterness pushes in front of the orange and the cinnamon and makes the cake taste of salad. For vasilopita you take a round, soft oil.
Preheat the oven to 175 °C top and bottom heat. Butter a 24–26 cm springform tin and dust it with flour, or line it with parchment. With a springform, wrap the outside in foil as well — olive oil batter is runnier than butter batter and finds every gap.
Beat the eggs with the sugar for five minutes on the highest setting, until the mixture is pale, thick and almost white. When you lift the whisk out, a ribbon should run back into the mixture and stay visible for a moment.
Pour the oil in a thin stream while you keep stirring — do not tip it in all at once. That way it binds with the egg and the batter does not end up sitting on the bottom of the tin later. It takes two minutes, and it is the difference between a moist cake and an oily one.
Stir in the orange juice, the zest, the brandy, the cinnamon, the clove and the vanilla sugar. The batter turns thin now and smells of Christmas — that is how it should be.
Sift the flour with the baking powder and the salt twice and fold it into the batter in two batches. Work with a spatula, from the bottom up, and stop as soon as no dry flour is visible. Any further movement makes the cake tough.
Put half the batter into the tin. Roll the coin, still in its foil, in a little flour — then it will not slide to the bottom — and lay it in the middle, not right at the base and not right at the surface. Add the rest of the batter on top and smooth it out.
Bake at 175 °C on the middle shelf for 45–55 minutes. After 30 minutes, cover the surface loosely with foil so it does not get too dark. The cake is done when a wooden skewer comes out dry from the centre. The skewer test is compulsory here: every cake has its own timing, and a vasilopita taken out too early collapses in the middle.
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then turn it out and let it cool completely. Finally dust it with icing sugar. If you want the year on top: cut “2027” out of paper, lay it on, dust with icing sugar, lift the paper off carefully.
The custom is old, the rules are simple, and three of them get overlooked all the time.
The cutting follows a fixed order: the first slice for Christ, the second for the house, the third for Saint Basil, then the people of the house by age — the oldest first. Guests get their slices after that. It is not about superstition, it is about everyone at the table being named once before anyone gets their piece.
A sponge made with butter is dry by the third day at the latest. A cake made with olive oil is not — it stays moist for up to a week, without having to be forced into foil. That is not a compromise, it is the reason the New Year’s pita has been baked with oil in Greek households for generations: it gets baked whenever there is time and cut when visitors arrive.
It helps that orange and olive oil carry each other: the oil takes the bitterness off the zest and softens it, the juice takes the weight off the oil. With butter this interplay does not work as well.
This recipe wants a mild oil — the Koroneiki from the 500 ml bottle is more robust than needed, but works well at half the quantity. If you are baking the cake for a big house, take the 1 litre bottle.
In a tin or under a glass dome the vasilopita keeps for five to seven days. Dust with icing sugar only shortly before serving. Freezing: sliced, in foil, for up to two months — individual slices thawed are almost like fresh.
The coin, the order of cutting and the date. As for the batter, the modern vasilopita is an olive oil sponge with orange and cinnamon — in principle you can bake it all year round, it is only called that at New Year.
No. Without a coin it is a New Year cake without a lottery. If you want to leave it out for safety reasons — small children, guests who don’t know — you can press an almond-shaped hollow into one slice instead and pretend that was the lucky spot. Sounds silly, works surprisingly well.
Mostly baked too long, or the oil was stirred in all at once instead of slowly. The second common cause: too much flour. The batter should be thick and pourable and spread out in the tin, not drop in as a lump.
Round, 24–26 cm, with a tube base. The round tin is part of the ritual — you cut from the edge to the centre so that every slice gets some crust. A loaf tin works, but it is a different gesture.
Yes, and it gets better for it. Overnight it settles and on 1 January it tastes rounder than freshly baked. Only the dusting is done on the day itself.
