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Lemon polenta cake
This cake is a sort of Anglo-Italian amalgam. It is a good marriage: the flavoursome grittiness of the polenta and tender rubble of ground almonds provide so much better a foil for the wholly desirable dampness of the drizzle than does the usual flour. If you were to try to imagine what lemon curd would taste like in cake form, this would be it.
For this recipe you will need 1 x 23cm/9in springform round cake tin.
From Nigella Lawson
For the cake
200g/7oz soft unsalted butter, plus some for greasing
200g/7oz caster sugar
200g/7oz ground almonds
100g/3½ fine polenta/cornmeal
1½ tsp baking powder (gluten-free if required)
3 free-range eggs
2 lemons, zested (save the juice for the syrup)
For the syrup
2 lemons, juiced (see above)
125g/4oz icing sugar
Line the base of your cake tin with baking parchment and grease its sides lightly with butter. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
Beat the butter and sugar until pale and whipped, either by hand in a bowl with a wooden spoon, or using a freestanding mixer.
Mix together the almonds, polenta and baking powder, and beat some of this into the butter and sugar mixture, followed by one egg. Alternate adding dry ingredients and eggs, beating the mixture all the while.
Finally, beat in the lemon zest and pour, spoon or scrape the mixture into your prepared tin. Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. It may look wibbly but, if the cake is cooked, a cake tester should come out cleanish when pushed into the centre of the cake. Most significantly, the edges of the cake will have begun to shrink away from the sides of the tin. Remove the cake from the oven to a wire cooling rack, but leave it in its tin.
Make the syrup by boiling together the lemon juice and icing sugar in a smallish non-reactive saucepan. Once the icing sugar’s dissolved into the juice, you’re done. Prick the top of the cake all over with a cake tester (a skewer would be too destructive), pour the warm syrup over the cake, and leave to cool before taking it out of its tin.
