you know those cakes that seem so simple yet you can't help stealing a bit every time you walk by it? well, this is one of those.
and as much as we love impressive cakes with lots of decorations and colors, we do have a soft spot for those uncomplicated "gâteaux de grand-mère", like our ginger cake or our flourless chocolate and port cake.
it is light, airy, with a lovely lemon taste. and it fills the house with the nicest smell!
we found the inspiration on the great french and italian blog un déjeuner de soleil, where you can find the recipe for a cake called Dolce d'Amalfi.
Here's our own version of this cake:
for the cake:
100 g icing sugar
10 g vanilla sugar
70 g soft butter
70 g ricotta
2 eggs
100 g milk
100 g ground almonds (almond powder)
90 g flour
40 g rice flour
1 tbsp bakingpowder
a pinch of salt
2 lemons (zests + juice)
3 tbsp icing sugar (for the icing)
preheat the oven to 160°C (320 F).
in a bowl, mix together butter, ricotta and icing sugar and vanilla sugar until creamy. add then the zests of the two lemon.
incorporate the eggs one by one, and mix until combined.
add finally ground almonds, flour, rice flour, salt and baking powder. mix until combined.
butter and flour a baking pan.
bake for about 40 minutes (until a knife comes out clean).
leave to cool completely.
prepare the icing: mix together 3 tbsp icing sugar and the juice of the 2 lemons. spread the mixture on the cake.
piece of advice:
when spreading the icing on the cake, you can place the cake on a cake rack, and the cake rack on a baking sheet. that way you can collect the syrup that runs down the cake in the baking sheet, and spread it again on the cake
