*I’ve specified buttermilk in the ingredients list, but you can use runny plain yogurt in its stead. Or, easier still, make your own buttermilk – my fallback position – by adding 1 tablespoon of lemon juice (since you will have lemons at hand for this recipe; otherwise you can use white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar instead) to 1 cup reduced fat milk and letting it stand for 20 minutes before you need it, stirring before use.
Now, a cautionary word: even when the cake looks bronzed and ready, you need to make sure that it’s cooked through around the funnel. Otherwise, not only will it be the devil to unmold, but you will also find the cake disappointingly undercooked (however brown it looks on the surface) once you slice into it. If you don’t have a bundt pan, then you can make this in an 8-inch square cake pan (approx. 2¼ inches deep). It makes quite a high cake, almost the full height of the pan, and takes between 1 hour to 1 hour 20 minutes at the oven temperature below (and check that it is cooked all the way through to the center before removing it from the oven).
Excerpted from Simply Nigella by Nigella Lawson. Recipes copyright © 2015 Nigella Lawson, Photography copyright © 2015 Keiko Oikawa. Published by Appetite by Random House, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd., a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.