Three Sisters and a Dog: Lemon Polenta Cake

Sorry for being absent for a while- a combination of exams, dissertations and holidays is to blame. Bad bloggers. But we're back with a great new recipe to make up for it!

I've recently had to go on a gluten-free diet, so to compensate for having to give up my regular diet of gluten-filled cookies, cakes, brownies and delicious-ness, we decided to bake this gluten-free polenta cake. We got the idea from trying a similar one in a cafe a few weeks ago and wanted to replicate it.

We used this Nigella Lawson recipe which is pretty easy, and the end result was super yummy.

Ingredients

For the cake:

200 grams soft unsalted butter (plus some for greasing)
200 grams caster sugar
200 grams ground almonds
100 grams fine polenta (or cornmeal)
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder (gluten free if required)
3 large eggs
zest of 2 lemons (save juice for syrup)

For the syrup:

juice of 2 lemons
125 grams icing sugar

Before you begin, pop your oven on to 180°C and line the base of a 9inch cake tin with baking parchment and grease the sides with butter.

Start by beating the butter and sugar in a big bowl, until it is pale and creamy.

In a separate bowl, mix together the ground almonds, polenta and baking powder.

Add about a third of the dry mixture to the butter/sugar mixture, followed by 1 of the eggs. Repeat this until all the eggs, dry mixture and butter/sugar is one bowl.

Once it's all mixed together it should look something like this:

Somebody was lurking under the table hoping for a little bit of cake mix to go her way...

Add the lemon zest.

And plonk it all in the cake tin. Pop in the oven for about 40 mins.

While you're waiting, and bored, take a cute picture of your pet. (optional)

While you're (impatiently) waiting for the cake to be done, start on the syrup. Boil the lemon juice and icing sugar in a small saucepan. Until the icing sugar has dissolved into the juice. Then poke the top of your cake with a fork or something spikey to make little holes so the syrup can get into the whole cake.

Pour the syrup over the cake and try and spread it evenly. Then leave it to cool.

N.B. We left the cake in the tin while we did this to try and contain the cake in the syrup as mucvh as possible.