Lemon Poppyseed Cake
We may be a yarn business but cake is very close to our hearts too. We celebrate team birthdays. And when it’s your special day you get to choose the cake flavour. Cake is also an important part of our monthly Open Studio. Margaret, my mother does the baking most months, from scratch of course!. Which means she gets to choose what’s on the menu. April was a fan favourite – the Lemon Poppyseed Cake.
The recipe for our Lemon Poppyseed Cake goes back a long way to growing up in Durban in the 1970s. My uncle’s sport at the time was canoeing and he completed numerous Dusi Canoe Marathons. This approximately 120km, 3-day race finished on a Saturday morning in Durban and the whole family would go to watch. There were often hours of waiting so people packed picnics. And my grandmother would bake a lemon drizzle cake that became known in our family as Dusi Cake. It was baked in a tray and served cut into squares and was always delicious!
Having become an experimenter as an adult I have of course adapted the recipe. This doesn’t always turn out well with baking, but since my changes were only the addition of poppyseeds and plain yoghurt it wasn’t a huge risk. And now whenever my. mum bakes it she uses the “new” recipe. We still call it Dusi Cake even though most of the regulars think of it as Lemon Poppyseed Cake. There have been numerous requests for the recipe, so here it comes.
Lemon Poppyseed Cake Ingredients
250g butter
250g castor sugar
300g self-raising flour
3 eggs
1 cup plain/natural yoghurt
lemon zest
juice of 1 lemon and 100g castor sugar
Method
Cut the butter into small pieces and melt slowly.
Turn off the heat and stir in the sugar, allowing it to melt.
Beat the eggs and stir into the mixture with the flour, poppyseeds, yoghurt and lemon zest.
Bake at 200C / 410F in a ~20x30cm baking tray or glass dish for 25-30mins.
While the cake is baking mix the lemon juice and castor sugar.
Check that a knife comes out clean before taking the cake out of the oven.
Pour the lemon sugar mixture on while the cake is hot.
Allow it to cool then cut into squares and serve.
Delicious!