How to bake cakes without using butter

• Adam Liaw's Portuguese orange, olive, honey and almond cake recipe
• Luke Mangan's olive oil cake
• Kylie Kwong's crispy king prawns

​I want to eliminate dairy from my diet but I still want to bake cakes. Is there any one rule for substituting butter for olive oil? P. Law

Did you know that vegans love olive oil because the trees are wind-pollinated and do not require bees? I was speaking to Rita Bikins​ from Red Rock Olives in Pomonal in Victoria. She has done a lot of experimentation and has perfected just about every cake recipe substituting extra virgin olive oil for butter. "I can do everything except scones," she says. Rita suggests beating the eggs until they become creamy and drizzling in the olive oil as if one were making mayonnaise. Then add the sugar, beat until dissolved, then add the other ingredients. From her experience Rita recommends using three-quarters the volume or weight of oil to the amount of butter the recipe calls for. Because butter is around 15 per cent water you may need to add a splash of extra liquid to help hydrate the flour.

Why do Americans call prawns "shrimps"? L. Walker

Back in 1984 Australian was ranked 78th of the nations Americans wanted to visit. Enter the Paul Hogan advertisement in which he said to the American audience, "Come and say G'day. I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you". When we saw the ad, we reeled in prawn-related parochial paroxysms. Down Under we call the various species of edible crustacea "prawn". Taxonomically speaking there is no such thing as either a prawn or shrimp. For example, in Australia we call delicious critters from the Melicertus species "prawns" while the Yanks called them "shrimp". Both words are English in origin. The Brits use "shrimp" for smaller crustaceans and "prawn" for larger species. There is a popular restaurant in Saint Paul's Road, London, called Prawn on the Lawn. Until the 1940s shrimp were harvested almost exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico, with consumption limited to that area, so the word shrimp most likely gained currency in the southern US. As an aside, by 1990, thanks to Hoges, Australia became the seventh most desirable country for Americans to visit.

Is it safe to eat raw kale? K. Ho

Yes. Just don't make it your sole source of nutrition and consume nothing but kale smoothies. Don't worry, there are people out there who have tried to eat nothing but kale because they heard it was a superfood. Like other cruciferous vegetables – cabbages, broccoli, rocket etc – kale contains the substance thiocyanate, which in very high concentrations can interfere with adequate iodine nutrition and therefore affect the health of your thyroid gland. But you would have to eat a lot of kale. Endocrinologist Dr Angela M. Leung, from UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, told website EndocrineWeb.com, "In usual amounts, kale consumption is healthy and should not be avoided, in contrast to some media reports which caution against all ingestion of cruciferous vegetables to promote thyroid health".

Send your vexing culinary conundrums to brainfood@richardcornish.com.au or tweet to @realbrainfood.