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Lemony Rosemary-Polenta Cake
June 8, 2009 | 38 Comments
… and baking with jello molds.
There’s lot of work piled up and some travel in the works. That leaves almost no time for replying to e-mails or visiting my fav blogs or goofing around, really. I wanted to get this post out of the way before I lose my sanity.
This post serves many purposes. It’s my CLICK entry (with a bonus recipe), plus a reply to many mails and comments I have received. It’s rude, I know, to respond to private e-mails on a public forum, but it’s even ruder not to respond at all. Plus, I like to disseminate my faulty logic to the world, even if no one’s interested in receiving it.
To all the people to wrote in saying
– how sorry they feel for “that poor little snake” in my backyard
- how I need to grow up
- how I hurt the feelings of Hindus who worship snakes
Growing up is optional. Really. As my mom said, all one NEEDS to do are eat, sleep and go to the loo.
As for the snake, we scattered naphthalene balls around our veggie patch in areas close to our home. It’s nasty stuff and gives us a headache whenever we venture into the backyard or garage, but we haven’t sighted the snake again. Yet. We also put four solar mole repellers we got from Home Depot that also supposedly repel snakes through sonic vibrations.
Snake lovers and snake worshippers, if your heart’s bleeding right now, let’s reassure you, we don’t plan to kill it. If you send us your addy and we manage to find and catch the snake, we’d be happy to mail it to you live, within the continental U.S.
Except, I’m not sure if it’s legal. So we’ll just have to wait and see what to do with that creature. Maybe, I’ll force feed it some coffee. I make such awful coffee, that it ought to come with a statutory warning, like they put on pressure-treated lumber at Home Depot: “Do Not Consume.” (Ever since I saw that, I’ve wondered about who tried to eat lumber and what it tastes like.)
To those who wanted to know why non-stick cookware is bad, and why we don’t use it,
- an article on teflon toxicosis.
- cast-iron and stainless steel yield much tastier food and do not need to be replaced each year.
For baking, I like steel or silicone. Is silicone safe? I believe so.
I also love to use vintage jello moulds from the ’40s and ’50s, made of aluminium. You can find them at garage sales and thrift stores. My favourite sources are ebay and Tias.com. Search for “jello mold“. Or “aluminum jello mold“. Or “vintage jello mold“.
Over the years, I have collected several of these in various shapes and sizes – both regular (silver-coloured) and and copper-tinted (like THIS ONE).
They are lightweight and very inexpensive. It’s easy to stack many of these and store them away. They take up very little space in a shelf or drawer as compared to a cake or muffin pan. The only downside is that they are very thin and bend easily.
If you grease and flour them, the cake comes out with just a tap on the counter.
I don’t bake regular 9-inch round cakes any more for just the two of us. We struggle to finish one that size. These smaller pans allow me to bake mini-cakes – as many or as few as I want to that day. Like muffins, but much prettier.
Rosemary
I needed to use up 3 eggs, some old whole grain cornmeal and steel-cut oats. I remembered a polenta cake in one of the cookbooks I own (Coffee cakes by Lou Siebert), with rosemary and buttermilk. It has all-purpose flour and 1.25 cups sugar. I halved the sugar (replaced it with honey) and replaced the flour with oats. I used 3 tbsps each ghee (clarified butter) and extra virgin olive oil in lieu of the cup of butter in the recipe. It turned out just fine.
The cornmeal gives it a little bite. If you don’t have it, use semolina (sooji/rava).
Try lavender or thyme in lieu of rosemary for a different flavour. Or orange in lieu of lemon.
LEMONY ROSEMARY-POLENTA CAKE
With these measurements, I got 6 mini-cakes and 6 muffins. If you want to bake a single cake, use a loaf pan.
Grease the mini-cake moulds really well with butter or olive oil. Add about 1 heaped tsp of all purpose flour to each twirl the moulds around until coated and tap the excess flour off. Please don’t skip the flouring.
Or line some muffin cups.
Take
1 cup buttermilk
(or 3 tbsps water plus plain low-fat yogurt to make a cup)
2 tsps lemon juice
Heat it up for a minute or two in the microwave and add
1/2 cup whole grain cornmeal or polenta (coarsish texture)
(if you don’t have cornmeal, try semolina)
2 tbsps fresh chopped rosemary (or 2 tsps dried)
Soak it while you prep the rest of the stuff.
Preheat the oven to 375F.
Dry stuff
Take about
1/2 cup steel-cut oats (or whole grain oat flakes)
and grind to a fine powder in a spice grinder. You should have about a cup. If you fall short, add enough all purpose flour or whole wheat pastry flour to get a cup.
Add to the oat flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour or all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt
Wet stuff
Beat up
1/3 cup combo of clarified butter and extra virgin olive oil
(or any one of those. plain butter works too)
with
half cup plus 2 tbsps honey (or sugar)
(you can use up to 1 cup if you like it sweeter)
If using sugar, beat until the sugar has dissolved. I used honey just to skip that step.
Add
3 eggs (3/4 cup)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp organic lemon zest
Using a hand-beater or whisk, just beat the whole thing until well-blended.
Add the cornmeal-buttermilk mixture to the wet stuff and beat until blended.
Then add the dry ingredients and fold in gently until it comes together. I like to do all this in a glass Pyrex measuring bowl with a spout so that I can pour it easily into the moulds.
Pour into the mini-cake moulds until they are 3/4 full, or until almost to the top in the muffin cups.
Bake for about 15 to 18 minutes (depending on your pan and oven) until the cakes pull off from the sides of the pan and a toothpick in the middle comes off clean. Rest for 5 minutes and unmould. A loaf may take 25 to 30 minutes.
Lemony Rosemary-Polenta Cake goes to Zora @ Gardenopolis for Grow Your Own.
CLICK: Stacks
Event Details HERE
Photographer: Bee
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Lens: 100 mm macro
Shutter speed: 1/15 sec
ISO Speed: 100
F-stop: f/5
DEADLINE: June 30, 2009
Talk to you after a week. Or three.
- bee
Filed Under: aluminum, buttermilk, clarified butter, Corn, Cornmeal, Eggs, ghee, honey, jello mold, Lemon/Lime, Oats, olive oil, polenta, Rosemary, steel-cut oats, Wheat, whole grains
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38 Comments
Hi hi i came once when i saw the heading about snake and i saw the pic and i literally ran away from the screen as i am so afraid of them.
Even in India they kill them even if they worship them. Well can’t say about India – in Kerala they do
Now before someone says that is not true let me say were i lived they did
I love that cute looking mould, I have seen them in silicone here, but don’t possess one
The cakes look so cute and yumm.
Bee that cake looks delicious..love the moulds, they are so cute.
Getting rid of that snake = peace of mind (to me)… sucks to others!
I’m off to chk tias.com
Love those cute small bowls…and the mini cakes look delicious..yumm flavors in it
Nice cake….I also like to make small cakes rather big ones..its so hard to finish with just 2 people to eat
)
That’s a beautiful beautiful picture. & I would have asked you anyways about those cute cups:-) I Love going “Goodwill” Hunting & I will not deny that i have found some very pretty treasures there.
Glad to hear about the snake… never even thought of religious aspects till I read it here.. vastu or whatever?
Cake looks great.
Paz
I wish I could say I have the same problem getting rid of cakes, but my husband manages to get his hands on them and finish them off! So, I make lesser quantities anyway to keep him from devouring too much at once. This cake looks awesome! Love citrus flavored anything.
Such a hilarious post! The polenta cake looks good but I was wondering how u managed to stack them up (must have imagined a tower) until I saw your CLICK pic. I have some aluminium molds for mini tarts. They were really good. Also many of my cake pans were aluminium. You are true about taking the cake out of the pans!
Amma has a jello mould… copper tinted from the late 50s
heart shaped. 
We still get the aluminum jelly moulds in India – not antique yet here
I just saw a packet of polenta in the supermarket for the first time last month but put it back because I didnt know what I would use it for – now I do
I have that book too. Picked it up in bookshop in Mumbai for Rs.90!
Those little cakes looked like vadas at the first glance.
ok so i better not tell anyone i am using chemicals to eradicate the ants we have! oops! anyway the cakes are a lovely mix to Mediterranean flair. Simply yum! Hope you have a blast on your vacation! I need one too!
Hey, Bee, I’m going to try the Tiger Balm thing for lizards – we’ve managed to keep our apt lizzie-free but I see them lurking about. Since snakes and lizzies are both reptiles …
Happy, what you say is true. And snakes don’t like milk, contrary to popular opinion that has people feeding them milk – that’s what scientists say and I think there was something to that effect in the previous post.
Reminds me of a friend who says ‘I don’t ‘have to’ do anything. The only thing that I have to do is breathe.’
Love the look and idea of the tiny cakes and also of the fact that you made it so healthy! I have all the ingredients at home, maybe I’ll bake them in muffin molds.
the cakes looks so heavenly !
Mini cakes look awesome. I will buy those mini pans next time I spot them.
Glad the lurking crawly thing isnt around your house anymore.
You sure need a vacation after all this…enjoy!
The cakes look delicious! And I love the molds…thanks for the heads up on teflon! (and I am seriously in love with those molds!)
Good luck with the work and have fun on your travels!
Love the small portioned cakes,must be very flavorful with rosemary.
I remember how we got rid of a snake when it found abode in our car engine,that was a decade ago in India,still freaks me out whenever I think about it.
I like jello molded look.
G’luck with work and travel. Glad u haven’t seen the snake again.
What pretty little cakes in pretty moulds…I love mini sized goodies.
Come on..snakes are scary and we cannot wander bravely if its within our residential limits…when i was 12 or 13 we as a family moved to our new house which was built in middle of no where except a railway track near our house and all that we had was a fence as physical boundary and imagine during summer all kinds of snakes would visit us like cobra ,and that green ones on drumstick trees -sorry i don’t know the english name ,
After few years everybody in house were trying to kill snakes with a single throw of a stone!!poor mother would pour turmeric water before burying it..and this special treatment is only for cobras !!!
I am sorry my comment is in-appropriate for the post..
Enjoy ur time off. and thanks for sharing this recipe…will have to go scouting for polenta now
spam check!
Now that the check worked..
Thanks for the info bee…I sun dried my next batch, it still came out good. Will update the post..
I also make mini versions for the two of us! But I have bunch of young colleagues who like to eat, so most of the time full cakes/loaves also work
I have rosemary growing – will make these.
I always love your desserts. They are not too sweet and the portions are just perfect here for my taste. I also happen to be a big fan of cornmeal
yum – love your jelly moulds – I don’t like teflon coated bakeware – it annoys me that often that is the main cake tins offered in shops because every one I have ever bought gets scratched no matter how careful I am
My personal preference for baking in general is aluminum. I think it has pretty good heat conducting properties. Clean up can be difficult sometimes, though, which is just about the only advantage I can think of for non-stick cookware.
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I like the little cakes and especially that you used the rosemary in them, they sound delicious. I keep practicing my photo skills, hoping to catch up to you and some of my other favorite food photographers some day.
Bee!!! i haven’t been by in a long time and i’m so sorry! looks like ive been missing some great stories and recipes. i loooove polenta cake and the combo of this one seems so special. i’m bookmarking it for fall making!
Bee, How can 1/2 cup oats be 1 cup after grinding it up. Is this a typo, or did I misinterpret it.
-Vasavi
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