Easy lemon polenta cake

The lemon polenta cake I made for my birthday would make an excellent Easter cake. Consider it, won't you?

Ingredients

14 tablespoons soft unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

1 cup sugar

2 cups almond meal/flour

3/4 cup fine polenta/cornmeal

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3 eggs

Zest 2 lemons (save the juice for the syrup)

Syrup

Juice from 2 lemons

Heaping 1 cup powdered sugar

Line the base of a 9″ cake pan with parchment paper and grease its sides lightly with butter. Preheat the oven to 350f/175c.

Beat the butter and sugar till pale and whipped using a mixer.

Mix together the almond meal, polenta and baking powder, and beat some of this into the butter-sugar mixture, followed by 1 egg, then alternate dry ingredients and eggs, beating all the while.

Finally, beat in the lemon zest and pour, spoon the mixture into your prepared pan and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. When tested, a skewer should come out cleanish and the edges of the cake will have begun to shrink away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the oven to a wire cooling rack, but leave in the pan.

JOSIE note: After the cake was cool I wrapped it up and put it in the fridge. The next day I poked it with a fork a number of times and poured two shots of limoncello over it and then wrapped it up and refrigerated it again for about an hour before adding the syrup.

Make the syrup by boiling together the lemon juice and confectioners’ sugar in a smallish saucepan. Once the confectioners’ sugar has dissolved into the juice, it is ready. Pour the syrup over the cake (it should have holes in it from the limoncello step). Make sure it goes over the edges so you get a nice crispy crust.

Source: Nigella Lawson.