Mr Cake's Lemon Poppy Seed Birthday Cake

As I mentioned yesterday it was Mr Cake's birthday. He is tricky for me when it comes to cake, because I tend to think cakes that are decadent and rich are the best kind of cakes and so tend to go towards recipes with heaps of rich ingredients and slather it all in some kind of delicious icing. Mr Cake, on the other hand, prefers light flavours and even better if it has a healthy aspect to it. So we're not exactly aligned in that respect. ;-) What about you? OTT decadence or understated and classic?

When I saw this recipe I knew he'd love it, though; he has professed his love for poppy seeds many times and this cake is packed with them. I also just happened to have a new Bavaria Bundt tin I needed to try out - perfect for this cake!

Be warned; this cake is not an economical one to make! It uses nine eggs - eight yolks and one whole egg. Guess there are a couple of pavlovas in my near future. ;-) If you have any good egg white recipes you'd like to share feel free!

It rose quite a lot for a cake whose only leavening was air beaten into the mixture. I was supposed to cover it with foil while it baked but we had guests and I was semi-distracted - that probably would have stopped it cracking. Oh well, you can see all those delicious little seeds peeping through!

I'm very pleased with my new tin - the cake came out beautifully (I did grease it very thoroughly because of its complexity, but was still impressed that it didn't stick anywhere).

A quick splash of lemon glaze and a sprinkling of icing sugar, and voila! Afternoon tea is served.

As you can see there are a lot of poppy seeds in there. They make the cake crunchy and nutty and you can actually taste them - it's probably not my number one flavour but Mr Cake loved it and it was pretty good. The cake was nice and light, deceptively so given the ingredient list (perhaps that's dangerous - it also contains rather a lot of butter!) but we agreed that perhaps a less eggy recipe (perhaps even lemon yoghurt cake) could be used with lots of poppy seeds for a similar effect. Still, it's a great cake - and maybe there's a scientific reason the egg-heavy recipe is suited to poppy seeds.

I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen - if you want to try it, the recipe is here.