Black Olive Streusel

The great part about coffee cake is the streusel topping.  Of course that is only my opinion, Aki really only likes the yellow cake part.  I guess between us coffee cake works out.  In a recent dessert we made a simple rhubarb cake topped with a tasty streusel topping.  It was tasty and our minds began to wander.  We were also talking about the unique and delicious combination of olives and pineapple.  With both of these concepts bouncing around and a bag of dried olives on the counter we assembled olive streusel which we then paired with olive caramel marinated pineapple and freeze dried fruit cake.  (In the first rendition we used only pineapple and coconut, but think of the possibility of making the infamous fruit cake with freeze dried fruit.  That is for another day.)  Alright, so back to the olive streusel.  We knew we could not bake our dried olives or they would burn.  With that in mind, Aki made a white pepper streusel and baked it in a shallow pan.  When it was done we combined it with the dried olives and pulsed the two together.  The result is a black streusel topping with an intense olive flavor and a semi sweet crunchy texture.  The streusel worked well with the pineapple and it sparked many more applications and combinations for this and other semi traditional streusel toppings.