Orange Olive Oil Polenta Cake
Polenta cake with semolina, olive oil and a fragrant orange syrup
Servings: 12 servings
Ingredients
For the Cake
- 200 ml extra virgin olive oil
- 150 g light brown sugar (honey works very well too)
- 3 eggs
- 200 g semolina flour (or ground almonds)
- 100 g polenta (coarse)
- 5 ml baking powder
- 2,5 ml salt
- 3 oranges, zested
- 100 ml orange juice
For the Syrup
- ¼ cup light brown sugar (or honey)
- 100 ml orange juice
Instructions
For the Cake
- Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease a 25cm diameter tart dish that is at least 4cm deep.
- Whisk the sugar and olive oil together with an electric beater.
- Add the eggs one by one beating well between each addition.
- Add the semolina, polenta, salt, baking powder, orange zest and orange juice. Mix well.
- Pour the batter into the prepared tart dish and bake for 40 minutes until golden brown and set in the middle.
For the Syrup
- Ten minutes before the cake is ready, put the orange juice and sugar into a small pot and simmer together for about 5 minutes making sure all the sugar dissolves.
- Pour the syrup over the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven. Decorate with peeled orange slices.
- Serve the cake at room temperature with vanilla ice-cream or whipped cream.
Notes
- You can make the cake in a 25cm diameter springform cake tin. It has great structure once baked and can be served out of the tin on a cake platter.
- In the Jamie Oliver TV episode I watched, he used honey in both the cake and the syrup. I have made the cake using the honey, but as I personally don't like too much honey and it is quite expensive, I mostly use brown sugar when baking this cake.
- As mentioned, I have made the cake with ground almonds instead of semolina. Once I even baked one semolina cake and one almond cake. Of the five people who tested both cakes, four preferred the semolina and only I preferred the ground almonds. You could try out both options, but semolina costs about a tenth of what ground almonds cost.
- While I am simmering the syrup, I peel and slice another orange and let the slices simmer in the syrup for a few minutes. I even add a segment of the orange peel to the syrup. Before I pour the syrup over the cake I lift out the orange peel and slices. Once the syrup has soaked into the cake I decorate it with the orange slices and some finely chopped orange peel. If you would like to see a video on peeling, segmenting and slicing an orange, click here.
- The orange zest and juice can be replaced by any other citrus fruit, like lemon, mandarin or blood orange, or a combination of these.