Felt like baking something.
I’ve made this before; I use the recipe found here, except that I switched it back to poppy seeds and orange zest. I have no idea how this particular cake came out, although it baked beautifully, for once. I usually forget that my oven runs a bit hot. Not today, though.
Uses this recipe, only with orange zest and poppy seeds. This is kind of an escalation, in its way: yesterday I noticed that my neighbors were cooking on the BBQ, and I was roasting up some vegetables myself. So I laid on them some baked potatoes and roasted corn and tossed in some fresh onions because I can’t cook them anyway. I mean, hey, all that goes with BBQ, right? No sense wasting good vegetables.
Only they sent over a couple of groaning plates of BBQ – far too much in response to the corn and potatoes – so there’s nothing to do except go bake some seed-cakes and send one of them over. This is my standard go-to when it comes to getting free BBQ from neighbors, and it’s worked out well for everybody so far.
The neighbor gets the seed-cake that doesn’t have a scorched bottom.
Not that I burned the other one, thankfully. It just has a slightly darker bottom than the other. But you give the better seed-cake to the neighbor.
Moe Lane
PS: This is the poppy-seed and orange seed-cake, not the caraway and lemon one.
Link here. You know how it is: trying to juggle writing stuff during the holidays, and all that. Especially since we thought that the tree was on fire at one point. Turned out that our neighbor’s boyfriend was just making barbecue ribs in the back yard next door.
Continue reading Snippet from this month’s short story “Bearding the Invader” (Patreon, paywall).Did three at a time, this time.
Seed cakes! pic.twitter.com/3bso96ncXF
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) December 15, 2018
Two of them are for the baronial meeting / Christmas party tomorrow; I made the third because the smell will drive my wife mad if it’s in the air there when she gets home this afternoon and there are no cakes for her to sample. If I have a self-criticism, it’s that I may have skimped a little on the poppy seeds*. Of course, the batter tasted fine, so maybe I’m worrying about nothing.
Moe Lane
*Recipe here. Only, I went back to using poppy seeds and orange zest. Don’t get me wrong: it’s delicious with caraway and lemon, but I just like it better this way.
Baronial populace meeting is a holiday party and a cookie contest this month. I’ll let my wife make the cookies (she does pizzelles up a treat); what I’m going to do is some seed cakes. I cannot conceive of a SCA gathering that will turn its collective nose up at Tolkienesque seed cakes. I simply cannot.
Note: for this particular recipe I am going back to using orange zest and poppy seeds; I’ve done it up both ways, and I like it better without caraway. Caraway seed cake is not bad, mind you. It’s just not what I want in a seed cake. Although I do admit that the shire had neither poppy fields, nor orange groves. Be interesting if it did, no?
[UPDATE: It tastes fine, but next time I’m making it with poppy seeds. Caraway seeds don’t taste bad, but when they show up in American dishes it’s for savory foods, not sweet ones.]
Sorry. Phineas and Ferb are back on the kids’ rotation. Anyway, isn’t this nice-looking?
No idea how it tastes, yet – I’m not going to try a Hobbit-style seed cake from a recipe adapted by Diane Duane without my wife being present – but it baked up easily enough. If I have a concern, it’s the caraway seeds. Apparently there is a great debate on how many caraway seeds should be put into one of these, and this was one recipe where I followed the directions for making and cooking pretty much to the letter. And the letters said ‘lots of caraway seeds.’
Guess we’ll see!
Moe Lane
