This polenta cake is a completely new experience in my home.
No one in this family had ever made a dessert with polenta until yesterday.
The proof is that I brought a slice of this cake to my mom (a sometimes member of my “family jury”), and she looked at me with an expression of surprise and amusement, which says it all. 😀
And if for my mom a polenta cake is something never eaten before, it means that polenta cake does not belong to the Romagna culinary tradition, this deduction is clear.
But I, despite my strong Romagna roots in terms of eating preferences – don’t dare touch the traditional dishes of my family, my grandmothers, and this small, parochial part of my Romagna – I love the culinary traditions of all others, no matter where. And I love experiments.
So, who better than me could experiment with an unknown dessert in this house? 😊
To explain this dessert, I must say right away that it is a recipe for recycling. Meaning, recycling the polenta I had planned and cooked for lunch, which no one ate.
I won’t bore you with the reasons why we didn’t eat it, 😂 lunch was saved anyway, with the sauce for the polenta being diverted elsewhere. Only to find myself in the evening with a pot full of polenta (still warm! It stayed warm for an entire afternoon!). A pot, meaning a mountain, of polenta to relocate.
So: I baked part of it with a mix of cheeses, used a smaller part to make some polenta balls like these which my kids love; finally, I turned the last kilo of polenta into this cake.
I must say I don’t have much knowledge of cornmeal and its uses, apart from polenta or breading (I often use it instead of breadcrumbs), but I knew that cornmeal is commonly used in desserts in some regions. I remember very well the ‘meliga’ cookies I stocked up on when we went on vacation in Piedmont. And I knew, thanks to a conversation with a lady from Bolzano I met some time ago, that you can make sweet fritters with polenta, similar to our carnival ‘castagnole’.
So I did the math and tried. And I’m glad I did because it’s a delicious cake!
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Want more recipes with polenta? Here they are! 👇
- Difficulty: Easy
- Cost: Economical
- Preparation time: 10 Minutes
- Portions: 8Pieces
- Cooking methods: Stove, Oven
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: All Seasons
Ingredients
- 2.2 lbs cooked polenta (weighed cooked)
- 1/3 cups sugar
- 2.8 oz raisins
- 2 tbsps butter (melted)
- 2 tbsps rum
- 1 apple
- ground cinnamon (for decoration)
- sugar (for decoration)
Tools
- Cake Pan
- Pot
- Parchment Paper
Steps
Mix the polenta with a spoon to soften it if it’s too firm.
In my case, the polenta was still warm, so it was soft enough to mix without issues. In any case, after adding butter, sugar, and rum, it certainly softens.
Add the sugar and melted butter and mix to combine and dissolve the sugar. It’s better if the polenta is warm so that the sugar dissolves more easily.
While continuing to stir, add the rum (I used amber rum) and the raisins. I didn’t soak them, I used them right out of the bag.
Line a 9.5-inch pan with parchment paper.
👉 Next time I want to try baking it in a greased and floured pan, mainly to make the cake’s edge smoother without the wrinkles parchment paper creates and also to see if there’s a difference in baking time.
Pour the mixture and level it.
Peel the apple and slice it. Insert the apple slices vertically into the mixture, arranging them in a radial pattern (or as you prefer).
Sprinkle the surface with sugar and ground cinnamon.
Bake in the oven at 392°F (200°C) for 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool before eating.
I had no idea what the ideal baking time for this cake was. I consulted a few recipes to get an idea of the times, but I found very different times (from 4 minutes to 45 minutes!). I was undecided, but I thought at least half an hour would be necessary to cook the submerged apple slices and to dissipate the excess moisture of the polenta. During baking, the polenta softens, so after half an hour my cake was so soft that I didn’t trust removing it from the oven and decided to continue for another 10 minutes, and then another 10. The doubts I had were “how do I know when it’s ready?”, “what will the texture be like in the end?”, “will it be too soft?”.
However, in the end, 50 minutes were fine because the final texture, once cooled, is that of a moist but compact cake, compact enough to be eaten even with hands, the slice doesn’t bend or break.
Testing the actual baking is not easy, as the cake has a very soft texture when hot (not to say “polenta-like” so inserting a toothpick would be useless), so rely on your oven and instinct. If you decide to make this cake without using apples, I’m sure the baking time could be shorter.
Remember, though, that it firms up and lowers as it cools, resulting in a firm texture you can notice from the next photo: see that little hole in the slice? It had a raisin in it. 😉
Well, the polenta cake experiment was successful! 🤩
Perfect to eat with your hands because it doesn’t grease or break, this cake can also be eaten with a spoon (in fact, I ate it with a small fork). It’s creamy even though it contains no eggs, no cream, or anything else: it’s made almost of nothing, containing only polenta and sugar and very little butter, less than this you can’t, yet it’s delicious!
Enjoy your feast!
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In my WhatsApp channel and on Instagram, on the Facebook page, in Pinterest and in my two groups: Catia’s group, in the kitchen and beyond and Exactly what I was looking for! and if you want… subscribe to my Newsletter.
