Ingredients
- Cake:
- 1 3/4 sticks (14 tablespoons) soft unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
- 1 cup superfine sugar
- 2 cups almond meal/flour
- 3/4 cup fine polenta/cornmeal
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder (gluten-free if needed)
- 3 eggs
- Zest 2 lemons (save the juice for that syrup)
- Syrup:
- Juice 2 lemons (see above)
- Heaping 1 cup confectioners' sugar
- Special Equipment: 1 (9-inch) springform pan
Directions
This cake is a kind of Anglo-Italian amalgam. The flat, plain disc is similar to the confections that sit geometrically arranged in patisserie home windows in Italia the sharp, syrupy sogginess borrows in the classic British teatime favorite, the lemon drizzle cake. It's a good marriage: I really like Italian cooking in most respects save one - I've found their cakes both too dry and too sweet. Here, though, the flavorsome grittiness from the polenta and tender boulders of ground almond meal provide a lot better a foil for that wholly desirable dampness than will the usual flour.
But there's more into it than that. By a few alchemical process, the lemon highlights the eggy butteriness from the cake, which makes it wealthy and sharp simultaneously. Should you attempt to imagine what lemon curd would taste as with cake form, this is it.
Although I'm greedily pleased to slice and cram messily directly into my mouth, letting moist clumps fall where they'll, this cake is better eaten - in company a minimum of - with spoon and fork. In either case, contemplate it a contender for teatime comfort and supper-party celebration alike.
For that cake: Line the bottom of your cake pan with parchment paper and grease its sides gently with butter. Preheat the oven to 350 levels F.
Beat the butter and sugar till pale and whipped, either by hands inside a bowl having a wooden spoon, or utilizing a free standing mixer .
Mix together the almond meal, polenta and baking powder, and beat a number of this in to the butter-sugar mixture, adopted by 1 egg, then alternate dry ingredients and eggs, beating even while.
Finally, beat within the lemon zest and pour, spoon or scrape the mix to your prepared pan and bake within the oven for around 40 minutes. It might appear wibbly but, when the cake is cooked, a cake tester may come out cleanish and, most considerably, the perimeters from the cake will have started to shrink from the sides from the pan. Remove in the oven to some wire cooling rack. but leave in the pan.
For that syrup: Result in the syrup by boiling together the fresh lemon juice and confectioners' sugar inside a smallish saucepan. When the confectioners' sugar has dissolved in to the juice, you are done. Prick the top cake throughout having a cake tester (a skewer could be too destructive), pour the nice and cozy syrup within the cake, and then leave to awesome before you take it of their pan.
Make Ahead Note: The wedding cake could be baked as much as three days ahead and kept in airtight container inside a awesome place. Could keep for total of five to six days.
Freeze Note: The wedding cake could be frozen on its lining paper when cooled, covered with double layer of plastic wrap along with a layer of foil, for approximately 30 days. Thaw for three or four hrs at 70 degrees.
From Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson. 2010 Nigella Lawson. Printed by Hyperion. All Legal rights Reserved.