Friday, January 08, 2010

Cookbook Challenge, Week 6 - Donna Hay Magazine's Sage and Prosciutto Corn Cakes





Ok... so it's a few weeks after christmas now, and I'm once again running really behind in my Cookbook Challenge posts, but I'm determined to catch up again! Hopefully now that the silly season is behind me, I'll be able to find some more time to get back to things like blogging!!

So, this week's recipe isn't so much from a cookbook as such, it's from the December/Jan 2010 Issue of the Donna Hay Magazine. Considering I have way more food magazines than I do cookbooks, I reckon they are fair game in the cookbook challenge.

This christmas was at my sister's house and everything was already done, so there was no real need for me to make anything for xmas lunch. But since I had to make something for the challenge, I made these corn cakes anyway.

Now before you go wondering "where is the corn in that recipe." Polenta is actually made from corn. The recipe calls for instant polenta, but I could only find real polenta that I had to cook for 20 minutes, stirring over the stove. This still works out ok, you just need to be aware when you're adding the wet ingredients like the sour cream, that you don't put too much in, otherwise it could become runny. The instant polenta would normally soak up some of the moisture from the batter. So, I cooked my Polenta and added it already cooked to the mix. It worked out just fine.





The sour cream in these little cakes makes the whole thing pretty rich, so they are good accompaniment to a turkey or something like that. Just be really careful that you grease the muffin tins quite well and leave the cooked cakes to rest for a while, because I found they tended to stick quite a bit. A flat knife helped to get them out in one piece - however quite a few still seemed to break apart.

Ingredients:
1 cup of instant Polenta
1/2 cup of plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarb soda
2 tablespoons of chopped sage
sea salt and black pepper
1 1/2 cups sour cream
2 eggs
12 sage leaves, extra and 12 slices of prosciutto

Preheat the oven to 180c
Place the polenta, flour. baking powder, bicarb soda, sage, salt, pepper, cream and eggs in abowl and mix well to combine.
Place extra sage in the bases of 12 lightly greased 1/2 cup capacity 125ml muffin tins. Line each tin with proscutto and fill with polenta mixture. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until cooked. Turn out to serve. Makes 12.




2 comments:

penny aka jeroxie said...

hmm... so many nice yummy recipes from donna hay. I might just jump onto the bandwagon.

Rambling Tart said...

Mmm, I've never heard of Donna Hay but I love the sounds of these morsels! :-)