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...

Golden Lemon Almond Cake

I originally made this fabulous Golden Lemon Almond Cake last year and it was so delicious that I've made it about four times since then. The recipe comes from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes and was part of my Heavenly Cake Baker baking ring from 2011. I highly recommend this cookbook. While I joined the HCBers late so didn't make every recipe in the book, the cakes that I did make all turned out beautifully. Plus, the book itself is gorgeous - lots of color photographs, clear directions and helpful hints.

I made the Golden Lemon Almond Cake again for a party we had on July 4th and, once again, it was fantastic.

This cake is so simple to make because you don't have to do the standard alternating dry and wet ingredients. You just mix the dry ingredients together then add the butter and most of the sour cream and mix that together. Finally, you add the remaining wet ingredients and that's it! After the cake is baked you brush on a sweet and tart lemon syrup - so delicious! The cake has a wonderful body - substantial but not heavy or dense and the ground nuts give the cake both its amazing flavor and also keep it really moist.

I made a delicious raspberry sauce (also from the Heavenly Cakes cookbook) to serve with the cake. It would be equally yummy served with a lemon whipped cream or just plain.

mise en place

use a heavy-duty pan with funky edges and your cake will have
gorgeous lines and a golden brown crust

blanched, sliced almonds are toasted to a golden brown and then ground

after the nuts are mostly ground, the lemon zest and part of the sugar are added
and pulsed some more

I could just eat this mixture on its own

the flour mixture, the remaining sugar and nut zest mixture are added
to the bowl of a stand mixture and mixed to combine

the butter and most of the sour cream are added to the dry ingredients and are beaten

the wet ingredients are combined and then added to the dry

more than doubled in volume...it's a gorgeous batter!

in the close up you can see the little bits of ground almonds

ready to be baked

making the syrup...so delicious

done and cooled

so gorgeous and the smell - the lemons and almonds - is amazing

the lemon-sugar syrup gets brushed on what will be the bottom

the turbinado sugar in the syrup give the cake a
sparkly appearance and a sweet crunch

can't wait for the party so I can try a slice

Here is the raspberry sauce I made to serve with the cake. The first time I made this sauce it was also for an HCB cake, Moist Chocolate Raspberry Génoise. This sauce is so incredibly delicious. Sweet, a little tart from the lemon juice and very, very raspberry-ish (is that a word?). I could, literally, just drink it. In fact, it would be delicious in a martini or other cocktail or even just added to some plain soda water. Oh, I am getting so many ideas on how to eat this sauce!

just three ingredients - lemon juice, sugar and frozen raspberries

the raspberries are thawed and the released juices get...

...boiled down to a few tablespoons

the thawed raspberries are then pressed through the strainer (or foodmill)
to collect their "pureed" juices

the finished sauce

Bye for now...