Me, My Socks and Pie: Gluten-free Lemon Polenta Cake

I've been meaning to try a Lemon Polenta Cake Recipe for a while, which I found on the back of a packet of Imbhams Farm Polenta Flour. I finally got around to it this weekend, as a good excuse to use up a lemon excess.

Recipe as follows:-

115g Fine Polenta

175g Unsalted Butter - softened

225g Demerara Sugar

200g Ground Almonds

3 Large Free Range Eggs

Zest of 3 Lemons and the juice of 1.5 Lemons

1 tsp Gluten Free Baking Powder

Unless you are gluten intolerant then its absolutely fine to use normal baking powder as a substitute. I also chose to use the juice of 2 lemons, as the more lemony the better!

You need to preheat the oven to 160c and line a 20cm baking tin with parchment or a tin liner.

All ingredients can be put into a food processor and whizzed to a smooth batter, but mine doesn't have enough capacity. Instead I whizzed the butter, polenta and sugar together in the processor and then moved the whole lot down into the Kenwood mixing bowl and added first the eggs (1 at a time), followed by the almonds, baking powder and then the juice and zest. Its quite a wet mixture, but then I did add extra lemon juice.

It was then popped into the lined tin and into the oven.

Now, I normally bake cakes in a static oven and the recipe did not stipulate whether it was fan or static. You are recommended to bake it for 50 - 55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. After 50 minutes in a static 160c oven, the centre of the cake was still really wet, so I flipped it over to fan over for another 10 - 15 minutes. By this time the top was colouring quite a lot and still a bit moist in the centre, but then I don't think this cake should be dry. Its then left in the tin to cool, before devouring.

Its gorgeous still warm from the oven and would be lovely with ice-cream and perhaps some extra lemon syrup to drizzle over it. The demerara sugar also gives it a nice crunch. Whilst still tasty cold, it does become a lot more crumbly over the next day or so, so best eaten sooner rather than later - shame that! Whilst Googling to see if anyone else had tried it, I found a lady who had added blueberries to it - sounds scrummy.

My other baking attempt this weekend was a 100% Rye flour loaf that I had seen in my new copy of Paul Hollywood's How to Bake. An absolute bargain if you can get it at this price. Even cheaper than my Amazon copy!

I think I need to try this again and maybe add a bit more water as it did seem very dense. The black treacle in it gives it an unusual taste. Though not unpleasant when toasted with marmite. What a surprise!