Marmalade and Poppy Seed Cake

This cake, which was made following this recipe for Bitter Orange & Poppy Seed Cake, was a disaster on so many levels!  It just shows that even a trusted source of recipes gives an occasional dud!

So what went wrong? Althought the cake rose well during baking, and a probe test came out clean, the cake sank dramatically as it cooled - that was an ominous start. When I took it out of the baking pan it had dropped so much that the sides were beginning to cave inwards. When I cut it, there was a really dense stodgy layer at the bottom - it would have been impossible to  notice this with the usual probe test for being properly cooked. Baking911.com, my online bible, says the reason for this could be too much liquid or too many eggs - so a basic fault in the recipe.

The final problem was that the cake tasted of nothing in particular - it wasn't sweet enough and I couldn't taste the orange zest or the marmalade (I used a good quality marmalade, but a 'three fruit' flavour rather than orange, so perhaps that's my fault - an orange marmalade might have built up the orange flavour more). The poppy seed flavour wasn't very noticeable either, although they added their characteristic grittiness to the texture.

This cake will get eaten, as I can't abide waste - I think if it's warmed through in the microwave and served with some natural yogurt it might make a passable pudding - but I won't be trying the recipe again!

Sticky Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake

I wanted to make a lemon cake of some sort, to use the last of the lemons bought before Christmas. Unwaxed lemons don't keep well, and these were well over two weeks old by now. I like really sharp lemon cakes and desserts, but know that others in the household prefer things a little sweeter. I also know that I need to use more than one lemon in the average cake to get an intense enough flavour for me.

That is something I can rely on Dan Lepard for - whatever the flavour, he's going to do his best to make it intense and dominant, so that it really stands out. The zest of 3 lemons in one cake sounded ideal to me, and with the addition of oatmeal and poppyseeds, his Sticky Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake promised to be more than a moist lemon flavoured sponge cake, which is what most lemon drizzle cakes turn out to be.

One thing worrying me about the recipe was the baking temperature - 175C in a fan oven sounded high to me, so I checked the recipe as it was published in the Guardian. This gave a more reasonable oven setting, so I decided to go with that, and assume a typo in the recipe on Dan's site. I was also worried that several members on Dan's forum complained about the cake sinking in the middle, so irrationally decided to bake this cake with the fan in use, set at 160C. I don't really know why I expected this to make a difference, particularly as I think fan ovens hamper normal rising in cakes, so usually bake with the oven set conventionally, rather than with the fan on. Hey Ho! We can't be logical all the time!

Once all the ingredients were prepared and weighed, this was a very quick cake to make; I like it when every stage can be done with the electric mixer! It baked in the time stated, with only the slightest hint of a dip in the middle - definitely not sunken.

I was a bit concerned about the volume of lemon syrup used - I don't like lemon drizzle cakes which are so wet that you need a fork to eat them. The fact that I could see some unabsorbed syrup leaking from the corners of the loose-based tin wasn't very encouraging either, but when the cake was cut it was perfect - moist but not dripping with excess syrup. The flavour of the cake was well-balanced between giving a strong lemon flavour, but not being excessively sharp. The oatmeal gave the cake a firmer texture, and the poppy seeds an extra nutty dimension to the flavour as well as a chewiness to the texture. This was a robust, rather than delicate, cake - just the way we like them!

Poppy Seed Cake

It's late on Sunday afternoon, and I am short of both inspiration and baking supplies - only two eggs, no citrus fruit or vanilla extract. All I know is that I want to make something 'different', without nuts, as nuts seem to have dominated my baking recently. Rumaging through my storage box of nuts and dried fruit I find a packet of poppy seeds, bought for sprinkling on bread dough before baking. It's years since I made a poppy seed cake, but the only recipe I have adds citrus flavours too. Can I find a recipe using flavours that my fussy son will eat, but only using two eggs?

It doesn't take long to find this recipe for a plain poppy seed cake. But now I'm worried that it will be too plain and that the flavour will be bland. A bit more searching leads me to this recipe which adds veins of sugar, flavoured with cocoa and cinnamon; perhaps I can combine the two.

So, I make a mixture of 75g demerara sugar, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a tablespoon of cocoa. I follow the recipe with no problems and put 1/3 of the batter into the loaf tin, which I've lined with baking parchment - this turns out to be important! Then I cover the surface with a generous sprinkle of the sugar mixture, and add another 1/3 of the batter.

It's now that I realise that a 1lb loaf tin is not going to be big enough! Fortunately my 2lb loaf tin is similar in its base dimensions to my smaller tin - just a centimetre or so longer and wider - with most of the difference in size being in the height. So I grasp the baking parchment liner by diagonally opposite corners, pick it up carefully and place it into the larger tin. I'll just have to hope the batter spreads neatly of its own accord, as I don't want to mess up the layers by spreading it myself.

Continuing with the layers, I add another sprinkle of sugar, then the last portion of the batter. There's still a lot of sugar mix left, so I also add a layer on top of the cake mix.



The finished cake looks more impressive than I'd expected, although the sugar mix on top of the cake makes it messy to handle - either leaving it plain or adding a chocolate glaze after baking would have been better, I think. Moving the cake mix doesn't seem to have messed up the layers too much.

There are a few small patches through the cake where the thickness of the layer of sugar has prevented the cake mix on either side of it bonding together. I think this could be rectified by using a more traditional streusel mixture of flour, sugar and butter with cocoa and cinnamon flavouring, so that it behaves more like a cake mixture during baking.

The cocoa and cinnamon add an extra dimension to the nuttiness of the poppy seeds, but I think it will be worth trying a plainer poppy seed cake, now that I've tasted it - perhaps with just a little vanilla extract added.