My Mom’s Poppy Seed Cake is one of the easiest cakes to make, and it was my Mom’s “go to” cake for entertaining, for many years.  She’d whip one of these up when expecting guests for coffee or tea.  It is a great cake for beginners – one of the first cakes I ever baked.  The recipe is extremely simple, quick, and forgiving.  You mix all of the ingredients together, bake it for a hour, and Ta Da! You have a nice, moist cake with great flavor.  This cake also stores well for several days after baking, and retains it’s moisture and taste.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups Flour
• 1 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 1/2 – 2 cups Sugar (the original recipe calls for two cups of sugar, but I find that 1 1/2 cups is plenty sweet)
• 2 tbsp Poppy Seeds
• 3 Eggs
• 1 1/2 cups Milk
• 1 1/2 cups Canola Oil
• 1 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 1/2 tsp Almond Extract

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F (~ 177 C).
2. Beat all of the ingredients together.  If you want to be proper about it, you should shift together the flour and baking powder, and then combine it with the remaining dry ingredients including the poppy seeds.  Separately, you should beat together the wet ingredients, and then combine them with the dry.  This is a very forgiving recipe, so you can also toss all of the ingredients in at the same time, and as long as you mix it thoroughly, you will achieve the same results.
3. Pour the cake batter into a well greased bunt-cake pan, and bake for a hour.
4. Once you have removed the cake from the oven, allow it to cool for 10-15 minutes, before inverting it on to a large cake plate.  The cake should pop right out, but if it is giving you issues, gently run a butter knife along the edges of the pan to loosen the cake.
5. Once the cake has fully cooled, this is a cake that is best served cold, make a citrus glaze to ice the cake.

Citrus Glaze

Ingredients:

•  2 – 3 cups Powdered Sugar
• juice of 1 Lemon or half of an Orange

Directions:

1. Combine the powdered sugar and citrus juice of choice until you obtain the right consistency for your glaze.  You want it to be thin enough to run down the sides of the cake slightly, but thick enough that most of the glaze will stay on the top of the cake and not in a puddle at the bottom.  This is really a trial and error methodology, and as you can see in the pictures, I wasn’t having much luck with it myself.  I didn’t make enough glaze the first time around so I had to make a second batch, and by that time the previous glaze had already started to dry, leaving me with some ugly results.  I also decided to experiment with using the citrus zest in my glaze, that was decidedly not successful.