Lemon Poppy Seed Yumminess

If I want my body to remain on speaking terms with me, I have to keep my wheat/gluten consumption to a minimum. This is rather inconvenient for someone who loves dessert (hence my totally irrational excitement over the discovery of dark chocolate and port!). Not long after I started this blog, I found another, much fancier, food blog done by a woman whose name I don't know. I have quickly become a fan. This past weekend, she posted a recipe for a Lemon Poppy Seed cake. I immediately noticed that the entire cake recipe calls for only 1/2 cup of flour. My dessert-loving antenna perked right up and I tried the recipe this evening. Delicious! If lemon cake and lemon pudding were to meet and fall in love and get married, this cake would be their baby. It is a super strange recipe on all fronts: very little flour or sugar, but a whole 1/2 cup of corn starch and 8 egg yolks! The texture is surprisingly "light", but also strangely creamy. I am going to direct you to this lady's blog (so long as you promise to still read mine) for the recipe and instructions:
Smitten Kitchen: Poppy Seed Lemon Cake
If you decide to try it, here are a few things that I found:
- At first the idea of using nearly a whole dozen eggs (and just their yolks at that) almost made me abandon ship. But then I decided that a dozen eggs cost about $2 and so even if I did waste all those egg whites, it wasn't really that big of a deal. Then this afternoon, I learned that egg whites can be frozen. I am not sure that I will ever use them, but I did freeze little baggies of 2 egg whites each for future use...
- I do not have a tube pan and really dislike trying to grease bundt pans with all those little ridges, so I just used a 9in x 9in brownie pan. I still greased and floured the dish and turned it over to serve the finished square cake by itself (instead of serving it out of the pan like brownies).
- I bought the poppy seeds in the baking section at the grocery store. The little $2.99 container was just shy of a 1/2 cup.
- She says to grease a sheet of foil and cover the dish while baking. I did this but the cake still stuck to the foil when it rose and I ended up just taking it off for the last 20 minutes of cooking.
- I don't know if this is a funky Colorado elevation thing or just the fact that I used a different kind of pan, but she cooked her cake for 40 minutes and it took mine an hour and 20 minutes. I judged it as done when the middle stopped jiggling and the edges were light brown and starting to pull away from the edges.
- Lastly, once the cake had cooled a tiny bit, I dusted it with powdered sugar on top. My mom used to have this funny little metal cup with a mesh bottom and you turned a handle to sift powdered sugar out. I don't have anything like that but I do have a wire mesh strainer. I put the powdered sugar in that and lightly tapped the side to let the powdered sugar dust come out the bottom. I felt just like Marmie in Little Women (the movie) in the scene where it is Christmas and they are in the kitchen and Meg and Jo are arguing about whether Meg should marry John Brooks or not. While they are talking, Marmie is dusting this cake with powdered sugar just the same way I did it. That was a nice, domestic moment for me: dusting my cake and feeling like Marmie in Little Women!

If you try this one, let me know if you enjoy it!