Taste and Create: Orange and Poppy Seed Cake

This month for Taste and Create I was paired up with Twenty Something and Cooking - a great blog name!!!! And also a great blog by a group of 20 somethings adventuring into the kitchen. I had fun looking through this blog trying to pick recipes to try and may well try a couple more at some point, but for this event I made the Orange and Poppy Seed Cake. I'm not sure how or why I ended up choosing this recipe but I'm really glad I did because it was so tasty and full of tasty orange. I took this to youth group and they loved it too.



Orange and poppy seed cake

Ingredients
1/3 cup poppy seeds
3/4 cup milk
200g butter, softened
1 tbsp finely grated orange rind
3/4 cup caster sugar
3 eggs
2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1/2 cup shredded orange rind



Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 160˚C.
2. Stir together the milk and poppy seeds in a bowl and set to the side.
3. Beat butter, orange rind, and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
5. Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture.
6. Add orange juice, poppy seed & milk mixture into the batter and beat in.
7. Spoon into a greased 20cm round cake tin.
8. Bake for 55 - 60 minutes or until cook when tested with skewer.

9. While cake is baking, place sugar, orange juice and rind in a saucepan over low heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved.
10. Turn up the heat and boil for 5 - 6 minutes or until syrupy.
11. Pour half of the hot syrup over the hot cake. To serve, cut the warm / cold cake and pour over remaining syrup. (I poured all the syrup over the cake which worked well)



If you've not taken part in Taste and Create before you really should. You sign up each month by the 8th to say you want to partcipate, then you a few days later you get an email saying who you're paired with. You have a good rummage round that person's blog and pick a recipe to recreate and blog about, then email the results back for the big round up. Such a great concept. I love this event!