lemon polenta cake (gluten-free)
This is actually Nigella Lawson's recipe, with only minor variations. Really gorgeous -- dense and rich without being stodgy. As she says, it's like if lemon curd were a cake.
Ingredients
200g soft unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
200g ground almonds
100g fine polenta (or cornmeal)
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
zest of 2 lemons (save juice for syrup)
125 grams icing sugar (for the syrup)
Method
Line the base of a 23cm / 9inch springform cake tin with baking parchment and grease its sides lightly with butter.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C Fan/(350°F).
Beat the butter and sugar till pale and whipped.
Mix together the almonds, polenta, salt and baking powder, and beat some of this into the butter-sugar mixture, followed by 1 egg, then alternate dry ingredients and eggs, beating all the while.
Finally, beat in the lemon zest and pour, spoon or scrape the mixture into your prepared tin and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes.
It may seem wibbly but, if the cake is cooked, a cake tester should come out cleanish and, most significantly, the edges of the cake will have begun to shrink away from the sides of the tin. remove from the oven to a wire cooling rack, but leave in its tin.
Make the syrup by boiling together the lemon juice and icing sugar in a smallish saucepan. Once the icing sugar’s dissolved into the juice, you’re done.
Prick the top of the cake all over with a toothpick, pour the warm syrup over the cake, and leave to cool before taking it out of its tin.
VEGAN VERSION: Use 200g unsalted vegan butter block (Flora is a good one) instead of butter and and 180g Crack'd egg substitute instead of eggs, and increase baking powder by 1/4 tsp. May need to bake a little longer and at an ever-so-slightly lower temp.