Guest Bloggers

Orange and Poppy Seed Cake – Guest Bloggers: Sarah and Jeremy

Thursday, April 8th, 2010


Sarah is a lovely friend, who had given some thought to starting up her own food blog. Although with University, placements, study, work, sport, seeing family and friends, cooking and (my most dreaded task) cleaning, there’s not a heap of time to create and manage a blog. Wow, she does do a lot, I don’t know how she fits it all in.

I suggested to her that if she ever wanted to post anything I’d be happy to have her guest blog on my site. And here they are, my first guest food bloggers – please welcome Sarah and Jeremy. They have chosen a lovely orange and poppyseed cake, which is a bit different to the one I normally make, which has a vanilla flavoured cake with a small hint of orange in the frosting. This cake has lovely strong orange flavours throughout and is perfect for parties or even taking to work. I’ll pass over to Sarah and Jeremy now… (sorry it’s taken me so long to post it)

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Hi! We are Sarah and Jeremy, and Sarah works with Anita. We have been promising this guest blog for ages and have finally got ourselves organised. We have gone with something simple and relatively easy that stores well and is different from Anita’s usual fare. We hope that you enjoy!

Orange and Poppyseed Cake

Recipe adapted from Family Circle cooking book

1 large orange
⅔ cup milk, warm
½ cup poppy seed
250g unsalted butter
1½ cups caster sugar
3 eggs, slightly beaten
3 cups SR flour
Extra ⅓ cup milk, cold
Icing sugar for dusting

Place poppy seeds and warm milk in a bowl and soak for an hour. (or until your orange is cooked, cooled and puréed – as explained below).

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Place whole orange in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. It is ok if the water does not completely cover the orange (as seen in the picture), just turn it occasionally and let it cook a little longer (until the rind is soft).

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When the orange is soft and easy to prick with a fork, turn the heat off and leave the orange in the hot water for a further 20 minutes.

Drain, and rinse under cold water. Cool for 1 hour. If pushed for time, we sometimes cut up the orange and place in the freezer until cool).

Cut the cooled orange into eighths (do not peel); remove seeds and blend until smooth.

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Cream the butter and sugar.

Beat in puréed orange – the mixture will look lumpy.

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Beat in the eggs.

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Sieve in flour and stir in poppy seed and milk mixture.

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Spoon mixture into greased 24cm ring tin – fluted is good. This is a large cake mixture, so you will need a large ring tin (we use a silicone ring tin, which makes it really easy to turn out).

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Bake at 180˚C for 45 min, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Remove from oven and immediately, whilst the cake is still in the tin, brush with half the extra milk using a pastry brush. This extra milk makes the cake lovely and moist.

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Leave cake in tin for 5 min before turning out.

Brush with remaining milk and leave to cool.

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When cool, lightly dust with icing sugar.

This cake is best kept in the fridge, but freezes really well. We regularly put a quarter of this cake in the freezer for a future date, and just allow it to defrost in the fridge.