hazlenut and polenta lemon drizzle bundt cake

hazlenut and polenta lemon drizzle bundt cake

• 1 Jun 2026

I do love a bundt cake and in fact I recently purchased another bundt tin to add to my collection. I was browsing through my copy of 'Around the Table" by Julia Busuttil Nishimura and when I saw the photo of her hazelnut and polenta lemon drizzle cake, I decided to bundtify it.

All the ingredients were in my pantry so I set to work modifying the original recipe to fit my bundt tin. The recipe isn't available online and I did make a few minor changes to the original. My batter was loose so I used less lemon juice in the batter but I added a lemon drizzle to the cake once it was baked.

Here's the recipe for you which makes a 5-cup bundt cake or 20-cm cake, adapted from a Julia Busuttil recipe inspired by this post. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced, you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20°C.

Hazelnut & polenta lemon drizzle bundt cake 
Ingredients
130g caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
100g full-fat plain yoghurt
100mls extra-virgin olive oil
zest of 1½ lemons
30mls lemon juice
40g fine polenta
65g hazelnut meal

pinch seasalt flakes

100g self-raising flour

Lemon drizzle
20 mls lemon juice
1 tbs caster sugar

Lemon icing
100g pure icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp melted butter
juice of about ½ lemon

optional

a few toasted hazelnuts

Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C, conventional. Thoroughly grease and flour a 5-cup bundt tin or grease and line a 20-cm round cake tin with baking paper.

In a large bowl, whisk the caster sugar and eggs together until pale and well combined. You can do this in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, but by hand is fine too. Add the vanilla bean paste, yoghurt, olive oil and lemon zest and juice and mix together until combined. Whisk in the polenta, the hazelnut meal, and the salt flakes. Now sift the flour into the bowl and very gently whisk the batter until the flour has just incorporated.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake at 180°C, conventional for 35-40 minutes for the bundt cake or 45-50 minutes for the 20-cm cake or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. 

While the cake is baking, make the lemon drizzle by mixing the lemon juice and sugar together. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, loosen with a knife before dousing with the lemon drizzle. If using a bundt tin, cool in the tin for 10 minutes before inverting. Otherwise cool in the tin briefly, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before icing.

To make the lemon icing, mix the icing sugar, melted butter and enough lemon juice to create a thick, pourable icing. Add a little lemon juice at a time, then slowly add more until it is the desired consistency. 

Drizzle the icing over the cake and set aside until the icing has hardened. If you like, you can decorate the cake with a few toasted hazelnuts. 

The cake will keep for 2-3 days in an airtight container.

You can't go wrong with a drizzle cake, can you?

See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.

Bye for now,

Jillian