Burnt Sugar and Lemon Cake
This cake is not sweet – the lemon and burnt sugar make it pleasantly bitter. Even my four year-
old son likes it served with fresh strawberries or ice cream and it is pleasing at the end of a meal
with coffee or an Asti Spumante as it is not too rich. I like this straightforward type of cake mix,
where you just mix the ingredients together and put them in the oven.
Ingredients:
300 g self-raising flour
50 g polenta flour
100 g butter, melted
120 g sugar
4 capfuls of Marsala or sherry
250 ml milk
zest of 1 lemon
4 eggs
1 sachet of Pane degli Angeli or Bertolini vanilla
yeast from your Italian deli, or 2 teaspoons
baking powder and 1 teaspoon natural vanilla
extract
60 g dark muscovado sugar
fresh strawberries and ice cream (optional) to serve
Thoroughly mix all the ingredients, except the muscovado sugar and the strawberries,
using a balloon whisk. It doesn’t matter if there are a few small lumps – it doesn’t have to be
completely smooth. Put into a suitable cake tin, which you have greased with some butter and
floured. The tin must be big enough to take the cake mix but not be more than two-thirds full or
less than half full.
The beauty of muscovado sugar is that it forms lumps. Place the lumps evenly on top of the
cake (but don’t be too formal about it). Some of the lumps will be larger and some will crumble
– it doesn’t matter. They will melt and caramelize, forming a wonderful bitter-sweet contrast.
Bake at Gas Mark 4/180°C for about 30 minutes. Test by inserting a knife into the part that has
risen the highest. If the knife comes out clean, it is cooked. If not, pop it back in for 5 minutes
more.
Allow to cool in the dish until lukewarm before removing. You may find that some of the
sugar has drizzled down the sides into the cake, fusing with the dish, so just cut around the
edge of the cake before removing rather than risk breaking the cake in the process.
*taken from the book ‘From Seed to plate’ by Paolo Arrigo, published by Simon and Schuster