Heavenly Cake Baker: Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake

The Heavenly Cake Baker club is over now, but I still frequently bake from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes cookbook. Her recipes are very straightforward and always delicious. She also has a great method (read: easy) for making cakes. You combine the dry ingredients, add the butter and part of the sour cream, beat for a couple of minutes to create air in the batter, then add the eggs and remainder of sour cream and then beat. So much easier than the old alternating the dry and wet ingredients, starting/ending with the dry.

So, back to this cake...although I am not a huge fan of poppyseeds, I've been wanting to try to make a poppyseed cake for a while, so who better to turn to than Rose? I have memories of my mother making some sort of lemon poppyseed pound cake when I was younger so maybe that is why I wanted to try this recipe? Well, regardless of the reason I felt compelled to bake it, this Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake was fantastic.

Even though it had a lovely light lemony flavor (and I even added lemon oil, not called for in the recipe), I would probably add some freshly squeezed lemon juice next time to punch up the lemon flavor a bit. I would also cut back on the poppyseeds slightly. The recipe also called for lemon syrup to be brushed on after baking...which I skipped. So I would definitely make the syrup next time and this might also help with the lemon flavor.

mise en place

oops, I accidentally started by beating the butter...no worries, I'll just mix
the dry ingredients in another bowl and then add to my mixer bowl

here we go, the dry ingredients mixed and added back to the mixer bowl

in goes 1/2 c of the sour cream

the butter and most of the sour cream are mixed in and beaten for 90 seconds
and then the remaining wet ingredients are added

and done...into the pan!

so pretty and smells great

a slice for the chef

delicious!

Bye for now...