White wine, olive oil and polenta cake

This recipe was the one I was talking about yesterday. It comes from June 2008's issue of Delicious, written by Rick Stein.

It's very Italian to me, or at least Mediterranean. The taste of the olive oil is very prominent and I thought that maybe if I left it for a day, the olive oil taste might be a little more mellow. Turned out, I was wrong, I tried it this morning and it's still there. I did reduce the amount of oil called for and added a tbsp and a half of lemon juice. The lemon taste is beautiful bolstered by the white wine. Rick called for a sauvignon blanc or riesling, but I had an opened bottle of chardonnay so I used that instead. The aromas weaving through my little apartment was so promising, so I was a little disappointed by the strong olive oil taste. It made me feel like I was eating oily cake which isn't appetizing...not very anyway. The lemon and wine made things a heap better, or perhaps I'm just not used to it. Fred liked it though but it wasn't our favourite.

Also something went funny when I tried mixing the flour into the liquid batter. It got clumpy and scary so I did something bad...I just used my hand mixer to whisk in the flour until it was homogenous. I know, I shouldn't have, especially when the eggs had been ribboned prior. But better than eating bits of flour I suppose. Do try out the recipe since it's so simple and let me know what I did wrong. It's simple enough to try again.

White Wine, Olive Oil and Polenta Cake (serves 8)
2 eggs
250g caster sugar (I used 175g)
150 ml white wine (such as sauvignon blanc or riesling)
150 ml olive oil (i used 125ml + 1 tbsp lemon juice)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
175g plain flour (I used 1 cup rice and 1/4 tapioca and potato starch each + 1 tbsp almondmeal)
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 instant polenta ( I used 1/4 cup polenta and almond meal each)
Icing sugar, to dust.

Preheat oven to 160 degrees celcius. Grease and line the base and sides of a 24 cm springform cake pan.
Place eggs and sugar in a large bowl and whisk using an electric hand whisk. Whisk for 10 minutes or until thick enough to form ribbons when you trail it on the surface.
Gently beat in the white wine, olive oil, vanilla and lemon zest and juice. Sift over the flour and baking powder.
Gently fold it with a metal spoon until just conbined, then fold in the polenta and almond meal. Pour mixture into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

*oh, I just realized, I didn't sift the flour over the liquids, I merely tipped it in... oops.