Friends and subtle sweetness: Lemon Cornmeal Blueberry Cake

This lemony bright, nicely substantial cake is infused with rosemary syrup for a subtle herbal sweetness. Recipe below.

A FEW MONTHS BACK, OUR EXCELLENT FRIEND LIZ, the person who encouraged us to create the feature we call Liz’s Crockery Corner, moved away. She and her family now live on one of our favorite places on earth, Whidbey Island in Washington state. Sweet, huh? But we really miss her. The other day, thinking of Liz and her family’s new world, I was poking around in The Hedgebrook Cookbook: Celebrating Radical Hospitality, the lovely book of recipes from the Hedgebrook writing retreat on Whidbey, and came across a recipe for Lemon Polenta Cake with rosemary syrup.

To create this lemon blueberry cake, we began with the Hedgebrook recipe and went on from there. We kept the rosemary syrup, but meddled with most everything else, taking out the polenta, adding in finer grained regular cornmeal, using buttermilk rather than yogurt for the dairy, and then, at the end, tossing in a bunch of blueberries, because blueberries.

The resulting Lemon Cornmeal Blueberry Cake is perfect. Lemony bright with fresh bites of blueberries scattered throughout, the rosemary syrup adding a subtle herbal sweetness. The cornmeal makes it nicely more substantial than all-flour cakes. And for us, it has the added deliciousness of being inspired by a friend. Thank you, Liz.

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Lemon Cornmeal Blueberry Cake

This lemony bright, nicely substantial cake is infused with rosemary syrup for a subtle herbal sweetness.

Ingredients

For the cake

• 1-1/2 cups unbleached white flour
• 1/3 cup yellow cornmeal (see Kitchen Notes)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1-1/2 tablespoons minced lemon zest
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon lemon extract
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 6 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for the pan
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup blueberries

For the rosemary syrup

• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 sprigs rosemary

Instructions

• Prepare a 9-inch cake pan: brush all around with oil and line the bottom with parchment paper—oil the paper too.
• Preheat oven to 350ºF. Measure the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Stir with a fork, then set aside.
• Heat the butter in a small pan until it is just melted. Mix in the six tablespoons of olive oil.
• Break the eggs into a medium bowl and beat them with the lemon juice, the lemon zest and the extracts until everything is uniform, about a minute or two. Mix in the butter and oil. Stir in the buttermilk.
• Add in the dry ingredients in two or three batches and stir together quickly, just until everything is mixed together. Gently stir in the blueberries.
• Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan. Put in the oven and set a timer for 30 minutes. It make take longer! The cake is ready when the top is lightly golden, the cake is just barely pulling away from the sides, and a cake tester inserted near the center comes out clean.
• While the cake is baking, make the syrup. Put the water and sugar in a small saucepan, drop in the rosemary, bring to a simmer and cook over low heat for 10 minutes. Remove from heat, strain into a small bowl, discard the rosemary and set the syrup aside to let it cool.
• When the cake is done, let it rest in the cake pan on a rack for 15 or 20 minutes. Run a thin knife around the edge to loosen the sides, then remove from the pan and set onto a serving plate.
• Poke the cake all over with a toothpick or the cake tester—you want to make a lot of little holes all over. Drizzle rosemary syrup on top (we used about half the syrup), letting it slowly soak in. You can use it all or you can skip this entirely. We liked the little extra sweetness and the little subtle extra infusion of rosemary. The original inspiration for this cake, in the Hedgebrook cookbook, suggests passing the extra syrup when you serve the cake, but we think it's already sweet enough.

Kitchen Notes

Corn meal? Polenta? The first time I made this, I used polenta—yellow corn grits. The difference in texture is considerable—if you prefer that chewy, grainy texture, then go for it.

More from the Hedgebrook Cookbook. Another wonderfully comforting dish we’ve made numerous times is this Italian Chicken Stew.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. In the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, you may have run across references to the British Empire—the enormous ramifications of the largest formal empire the world has ever known. The domination of India is part of that vast picture. By the time this plate was made, Britain had been relentlessly growing its domination of Indian for centuries. The British Raj—the direct “Crown” control of India by the British government—didn’t begin until 1858, but the colossal machinery to extract India’s riches was already well in place, helping to fund the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s wealthy, leisurely upper classes. The average Briton saw India pretty much entirely through the lens of style: easily consumable products—tea, curries, paisley shawls, Indian carpets, incense, patterns—in fabric, wallpapers, and, as here, dishes. This lovely little plate was made by Thomas Furnival & Company around 1845, and it’s called Indian Jar.