Good and Polenta-y

Campers, the wet cold dreichness of a Scottish August seems to have followed us home to Pennsylvania - and my compulsion to conserve the ripest, freshest summer produce has duly transformed into an urgent need to bake. This often happens when I am faced with rainy weather and many, many loads of laundry.

Inspired, perhaps, by my recent holiday and yearning once again for a slice of Valvona and Crolla's excellent syrup-soaked gluten-free orange polenta cake, I did something I don't normally do - I spent a few moments trawling the web for likely-looking procedures.

Now, I am on record as being distrustful of internet recipes and the ten minutes I devoted to the task were largely spent in vain. Most of the schemes I discovered involved the use of some proportion of *shudder* wheat flour; quick-cooking polenta (non in questa vita!); or strange manufacturer-specific sugars that I do not keep in the house.

No, I needed to be able to produce a gluten-free cake without any weird or convenience ingredients and did what I usually do in these circumstances: I made it up as I went along.

As a foundation for my cake I decided to use my favorite corn flour (organic! stone ground!) rather than coarse polenta, which I thought would provide too challenging a texture in the final product - if it even cooked at all. One of the recipes I found included some ground almonds in the batter, which I thought sounded like a fine idea - so I stole it. For the syrup, I decided to use turbinado sugar because I thought the brown caramel earthiness would provide a nice counterpoint to the oranges. I considered adding some orange liqueur or Amaretto to the syrup but didn't, in the end, as I'm pretty sure the cake at V&C was alcohol-less.

The fabrication of the cake proved to be simplicity itself, apart from the fact that in the process my trusty handmixer gave up the ghost with a fearful screeching and clanking and, if I'm not mistaken, a small puff of smoke. This alarming event necessitated the hasty retrieval of my standmixer from its appointed Metro shelf and production resumed without further incident. 

The result was extremely delicious, if I say so myself - one of my best yet, in fact. It was as moistly sweet and toothsome as the cake I enjoyed in Edinburgh (and looked like it, too!) and sufficiently cheerful and zesty to drive away gloomy thoughts of rain.

Orange Polenta Cake alla Scozzese

For the cake

• 3 eggs
• 7 oz granulated sugar
• 7 oz butter, melted and cooled
• 5 oz ground almonds
• 5 oz corn flour (organic! stone ground!)
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla
• grated zest of one orange
• pinch o' salt

For the syrup

• strained juice of 2 oranges
• 5 oz turbinado sugar
• splash of booze, if desired

Preheat your oven to 350 deg F. Butter and line a 9" round cake pan with silicon parchment.

Beat the eggs and sugar together vigorously until you get a light mousse. Slowly beat in the melted butter.

Add the almonds, corn flour, and baking powder and combine well. Mix in the remaining ingredients.

Pour the batter into your prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes or until the cake is done.

While that is happening, combine the orange juice and sugar in a small pan and heat slowly until the sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat and boil for about three minutes, or until you have a nice syrup. Add the booze at the end if you are using it.

As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, brush the hot syrup over the top - you might not need it all. Leave the cake on a rack and remove it from the pan when it is cool. Serve at room temp (or slightly heated in the microwave) with powdered sugar, thick cream, or ice cream.