The Cooking Chronicles: Lemon Almond Polenta Cake

I was inspired to bake this cake after watching the characters in Dinner With Friends consume it. But who knew one of the main ingredients would be so hard to come by? After an exhaustive search of many major supermarkets (for the record, the grocery manager at Save-On Foods had never even heard of it), and with the help of my Dad, I was finally able to get my hands on a package of polenta flour (coarse corn meal) at the Italian Centre.

Corn flour vs. Polenta

The recipe in the playbill was written in Imperial measures, which meant the extra step of converting the quantities to Metric, but after that, it was fairly straight forward. Though I should have left the cake in the oven for a few minutes longer than I did, and let it set in the pan before attempting to overturn it onto the cooling rack (oops), I was very pleased with the end product. The combination of a generous amount of lemon zest and lemon juice resulted in a nice, refreshing flavor, and the ground almonds supplied a great texture and crunch.

As I still have quite a bit of polenta flour left, I may, out of necessity, have to recreate this cake again.

Lemon Almond Polenta Cake