Orange Polenta Cake

Spring is in the air, and for me that means citrus cakes! I am super excited about this cake. For my birthday (way back last year), my lovely boyfriend was tasked with going out and getting me many slices of delicious cakes instead of one normal birthday cake. I don’t ask for much..

He got me a delicious and unusual selection, but our favourite was probably the orange and polenta cake. It wasn’t too sweet, but it was moist and a little crumbly and melt in the mouth delicious.

I’ve been on the hunt for polenta since then..

I cracked it the other day – the little Italian deli at the market, of course! They had it, and a ton of other absolutely delicious ingredients of which I picked up one or two.. or five..

This is a pretty simple little cake otherwise. I think I’ll play around with the proportions of polenta to flour to ground almonds, next time I might up the polenta and reduce the flour. I only have quite small and tall cake tins, so I divided the recipe into two. and got two flat but perfectly cooked cakes. Absolutely delicious!

Ingredients

• 250g butter
• 250g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• 140g polenta
• 140g plain flour
• 60g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Zest 1 orange
• Juice ½ orange

For the topping

• 75g golden caster sugar
• Juice ½ orange with water to make up to 75ml

Method

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees.

Beat the butter and sugar, and add the eggs one at a time. Mix through the polenta and ground almonds, then mix the polenta and almonds in.

Next, mix through the flour, baking powder.

Finally, grate over the orange zest and stir through the juice. Pour the whole thing into a prepared 23cm cake tin and bake for 45 minutes.

Allow to cool, and get a start on the sugar syrup topping – add the sugar, water and orange juice into a pan and allow to heat until all the sugar has melted.

Two cakes, one was in the top of the oven so got a little browner

When the cake is cool, pour over the sugar syrup and allow to sit for a few minutes before serving.