Poppy seed cake with lemon-sugar icing

Czech cuisine is one of those that use a lot of poppy seeds in pastries. In fact, poppy seed filling is one of three main fillings, the other two are made of quark and from povidla (kind of jam made by boiling very ripe plums). And since I love both poppy seeds and quark, obtaining both ingredients was one of my first targets in New Zealand. Fortunately, I could buy a bag of poppy seeds in imported goods store. So I could sustain my needs.

Unfortunately, for poppy seeds filling, you have to first grind the poppy seeds (and then cook it with some milk, sugar, lemon zest and some spices, like vanilla, cinnamon) and for this, a special grinder is required (and also a lot of time). So I had to find a different way to make poppy seed cake. I did that by soaking poppy seeds in warm milk for some time, this way they became much softer. The resulting recipe happened to be very fast an simple so I am making it even after I obtained my grinder.

I am using a standard cup for drinking tea that has ~200 ml. But the recipe is quite permissive if you want to reduce or increase anything.

Poppy seed cake

Ingredients

  • 2 cups of milk
  • 1 cup of poppy seeds
  • 2 cups of flour (standard white)
  • 1/2 - 1 cup of sugar (see below)
  • 1/2 cup of oil
  • 2 teaspoons of baking powder
  • 2 eggs

Directions

  • Soak the poppy seeds for about 1-2 hours in warm milk.
  • Divide eggs into yolk and whites.
  • Mix flour with baking powder
  • Mix flour, soaked poppy seeds, sugar, oil and yolks.
  • Beat whites and then incorporate them into the dough.
  • Pour into a baking container and bake for about 30-50 minutes, until brown.

If you use 1/2 cup of sugar, the cake will not be sweet, the sweetness will start from around 3/4 of sugar. But what you can do is make the cake less sweet and then make a lemon-sugar icing on top of it:

Lemon-sugar icing

Ingredients

  • 100g icing sugar
  • 1 spoon of hot water
  • 1 spoon of lemon juice

Directions

  • Mix very hot water with sugar and juice. Keep stirring until smooth and creamy.

  • Apply on a warm surface (poppy seed cake in our case after it cooled down)

For the poppy seed cake above, you will need probably 1.5-2 doses.

This icing adds sweet and fruity sour taste that mix well with the poppy seeds.