Recipe Dairy Free, Gluten Free, Lemon Polenta Cake

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I finally got around to making a dairy free (and incidentally gluten free) lemon polenta cake last week for my "1/2" birthday (being a Christmas babe, birthdays tended to get lost, so I adopted a 1/2 birthday policy many years ago and spread some of the calories of birthday and christmas cakes out across the year instead ...)

I have adapted the recipe from a website (Maitreya Social - a veggie/vegan cafe in Bristol) I came across. Their recipe makes a 10 inch cake that serves 12 and having made the cake that way first time around, it is huge and we felt a touch greasy, so I have reduced the fat content a touch.

If you don't want a Dairy free version, omit the soya cream and use unsalted butter in place of the dairy free margarine.

Ingredients
·225 gm raw cane/ Demerara sugar
·200 gm Soya Pure margarine (or other dairy free cream)
·100ml soya cream (or other dairy free cream)
·3 eggs
·3 lemons, fine zested & juiced
·200 gm ground almond
·100 gm fine cornmeal/ polenta/maize meal
·½ -1 teaspoon baking powder
·100 ml water
·2 tablespoons caster sugar

Method
Pre-heat oven to 140˚C. Grease and line with greaseproof paper a 8 inch loose bottomed cake tin
Cream margarine and cane sugar until fluffy then add the eggs one by one, whisking to keep mix fluffy. Stir in the soya cream. Mix in the lemon zest.
Fold in the ground almond, polenta/maize meal and baking powder together.
Place the mix in a cake tin and cover with a raised piece of aluminium foil with a tiny hole in the centre. Bake at 140 C for approximately 1 ¼ to 1 1/2 hours, or until a skewer will enter and leave the cake cleanly. N.B. do not open oven door for first 50 minutes as the cake does not contain any gluten (natural raising and holding properties).
Meanwhile make the lemon drizzle; add the lemon juice to a small pan, add the water and caster sugar. Gently bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes.
The cake is ready when a skewer exits cleanly. Cool the cake for 20mins, then using a small skewer/tooth pick skewer the cake evenly about 100 times. Finally seep the cake evenly and slowly (for maximum absorption) with the lemon syrup. Ideally refrigerate overnight.

The pictures are my first attempt which was a fully portion cake (the above is around 3/5th of what the website gives) in an 8 inch tin. It took more than 4 hours to cook because my microwave convection oven is not very good at low power and because I was using a 10 inch recipe in an 8 inch tin. It still tasted delicious.

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That looks good. I've never cooked with polenta, and I do use dairy, so I wonder if I could simply substitute the dairy back in to make something similar. It looks a lot moister than the usual cornbread or corn cake, similar to the corn pudding I made recently, which was yummy.
 
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