While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

As I mixed this cake batter, sturdy with ground almonds and polenta, spreading it thinly across a square tin…I knew within my heart that somehow I’d undeniably made a snacking cake. It just is. I’m still not amenable to the name being applied to any old regular cake-looking cake but as Justice Potter Stewart said, I’ll know it when I see it. I am reminded of a scene in a later Anne of Green Gables book where Anne’s firmly-held disdain for baby talk disappeared once she had a baby and was newly incapable of speaking to them in any sensible fashion. We live, we grow, we accept that some cakes move through the world with an aura of inviolable snackability.

Fluctuating contempt aside, let’s get to what really matters here: how delicious this Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream is. I’ve taken Nigella Lawson’s vegan and gluten-free recipe from Cook, Eat, Repeat, made it square and more shallow and covered it in an unnecessary but charming custard-tinted buttercream. The sharp lemon and the custard’s mellow puddingy roundness marry beautifully, and the textural sensation of sinking your teeth through the fudgy buttercream into the granularly dense cake below is really quite thrilling.

Lemon dashes through the cake threefold with zest stirred into the batter, lemon juice squeezed over the freshly-baked cake, and more juice in the icing. With the aforementioned structural density and the buttercream’s sweetness the lemons really hoist this cake onto its feet with their unmistakably fresh, optimistic citrus scent and flavour. As someone with a hyper-tolerance for gluten I’m not an expert in baking without it but the lack of flour here only makes the cake more mystifyingly wonderful in texture, with the gently gritty almonds and polenta melting into each bite with buttery, chewy pliancy.

I made this cake with lemons sent up from Mum’s tree at home; should you be enjoying a windfall of your own I also recommend the Old-Fashioned Lemonade to bring sprightly good cheer into even the darkest winter days, my Lemon Poppyseed Loaf Cake or my Lemon Vodka Pasta (which also links to my numerous other lemon pasta recipes), a timely recipe as I soft-launch the renouncing of my slightly strenuous scorn for vodka. Despite the miles gained in today’s recipe, snacking cakes still raise a little suspicion from me — but I appreciate that their aim is true: more snacking, more cake, that is always a good thing.

Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

Deliciously dense with almonds and cornmeal and swathed in sunshine-yellow icing, this is genuinely very snack-friendly. The cake comes from Nigella Lawsons’s Cook, Eat, Repeat and the icing is my own. Because Nigella’s recipe used weighted measurements and I’m trying to swing back into doing that anyway for accuracy, that’s how I’ve written it here.

• 150g ground almonds
• 150g fine (not instant) polenta or cornmeal
• 200g caster sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt
• 100ml olive oil
• 250ml/1 cup dairy-free yoghurt, at room temperature (I used soy yoghurt here but have also used rice-oat yoghurt successfully)
• 2 large lemons
• 3 tablespoons refined coconut oil, softened
• 2 tablespoons custard powder
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt, extra
• 300g icing sugar

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a 25x25cm square caketin with baking paper.

2: Mix the 150g each of ground almonds and fine polenta, the 200g sugar, the two teaspoons of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/4 teaspoon table salt together in a mixing bowl. I tend to sift my raising agents and since you’re gonna dirty the sieve later anyway for the icing you might as well.

3: Pour in the 100ml olive oil and 250ml yoghurt, and the grated zest of the two lemons (set the lemons themselves aside) and stir to combine. Spatula this very thick batter into your cake tin and spread it into an even layer, and bake for 35-40 minutes or until the top is firm and the cake is pulling away from the tin at the edges. Remove the cake from the oven, give it a few stabs with a tester or skewer, and squeeze the juice from half a lemon over the it, holding onto the other one and a half lemons for the icing once the cake is completely cooled.

4: To make the icing, mix the three tablespoons of soft refined coconut oil, the two tablespoons of custard powder and the 1/4 teaspoon salt with a wooden spoon, using the back of your spoon to press out any lumps. I find it helpful to alternate the lemon juice and icing sugar, so: squeeze in about a tablespoon of juice from one of the remaining lemons and then sift in a third of the 300g icing sugar and carefully stir together (so as not to shunt icing sugar clouds everywhere). Continue with the remaining lemons and their juice and the icing sugar, at which point you should have a thick, yellow buttercream. Spread this icing over the cooled cake using the flat side of a knife.

Store the cake in an airtight container in the fridge. Makes around 16 slices.

Notes:
When I made this for the photos I only had 100g ground almonds left and made up the rest of the weight with a ground linseed/sunflower seed/chia seed mix, which worked fine but is the reason the cake appears quite dark.

music lately:

Rocket by Smashing Pumpkins. Imagine writing this melody! I would be so insufferable! It would be the first thing I’d bring up in every conversation!

How Much Can I Stand by Gladys Bentley, I love the richness and confident growl in her vocals and the way she shapeshifts her voice to sound like a horn; this is a low-key tune but there’s so much going on.

New Rose by The Damned. Those jackhammering drums fill me with elation and have me feeling any mad thing is possible, like teleporting or learning to drive.

Dialects by Fathom. I was fortunate to share a billing with Fathom at an event where I read poetry and she played music; I love the way this song darts forward and climbs uphill then slows down before taking off in a zig-zag again, the sly, gorgeous melody keeps you guessing but never abandons you. Also worth noting she is responsible for everything you hear in this song and the video!