Lemon Polenta Cake, For Passover, For the Gluten-Free

This is a cake recipe that you can keep on a spare piece of imaginary paper, folded and memorised and tucked safely in your brain until you need it. Because a flour-free recipe that can be quickly assembled and only has five ingredients is a very handy trick. Especially if you happen to have dear ones who don't eat wheat or you happen to celebrate Passover. But the thing that really endears is that it doesn't taste like a subsitute. Like something you're eating because you've been denied normal food. As someone with a few obligatory and restrictive diets in her past, that is a damn fine trait.

I got the recipe for the Lemon Polenta cake from Nigel Slater's lovely, lovely site (that makes me want to have a garden urgently and immediately. Read that section and tell me your not a) getting on the waiting list for an allotment, or b) plotting the death of your lawn for the sake of dense fruit, flower and vegetable plots). He makes it into a layered cake filled with lemon curd and cream, and who would argue with that approach? I decided to keep it as one layer, brush it with a simple lemon syrup and cover it with whipped cream and some blueberries. I served it for tea, thought there would be leftovers and was totally wrong. I think anything remaining on the plate was, um, tidied up, as we made dinner that night.

And although there is of course no reason why you wouldn't eat flour normally at Easter, this would still be a festive little cake with all of its eggs, bright yellow colour and its ability to mate happily with cream and berries.

This cake will also save you if you want to bake, but find yourself without nice butter. One of the cruellest tales of the kitchen is The Fate of Baked Goods When Made with Crappy Butter. There's no need to relive this nightmare. Don't delude yourself and think it won't happen to you. It will and you'll cry.

Lemon Polenta Cake, for when you can't eat things, but don't really wish to be reminded of that fact (from Nigel Slater)

The cake serves not so many people. If you were making it for a seder, try doubling the quantity, baking it in two tins and making it a real layer cake.

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs, separated
• 110g sugar
• 50g fine corn meal/polenta
• 30g ground almonds
• Lemon

Method:

1. In a mixing bowl/stand mixer combine the eggs yolks and the sugar. Add in the zest of the lemon followed by the polenta and the ground almonds. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and add it in, too.
2. In another bowl, whisk up the egg whites until they're stiff (a pinch of salt helps here). If your bowl is large, you can place a tea towel underneath one side of it, gently tipping it away from yourself. This makes the pool of egg whites a bit easier to whisk and also stabilizes the bowl so you don't have to hold it. I used my eggbeater for this part and it was great.
3. Fold the egg whites into the yolk mixture in the following fashion: Add a dollop of egg white into the yellow mix and fold it to lighten it up. At this stage you can add the rest of the egg whites in two additions. To fold, use a broad spatula to scrape around the perimeter of the bowl and then cut through the middle of the batter. Use it like a blade so that is mixes it thoroughly, but you whites don't deflate.
4. Pour the batter into a butter/flour/parchment papered cake tin (8 inch) that you prepared earlier. Around the same time you also preheated the oven to 180/350.
5. Bake for around 30 minutes until it's golden and your trusty cake-tester comes out all clean.
6. Garnish at will, but think about boiling a tiny bit of sugar and water and lemon juice/zest while the cake is baking and giving it a gentle syrup shower once the cake is cooled. The lack of fat could lead to a dry cake, and this step will prevent that from happening.

Comments

[Lemon polenta salad]

Wow super preparation... Well done ...
https://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=batch_download&send_id=817789614&email=7cff47bb7cdcb76fbfa15e66c81a1961