Baby Lemon Poppy Seed cakes with tangy Lemon Curd
Someone gave me a huge bag of gorgeous juicy shiny lemons one day and what do I make, lemonade of course, what else? *wink*
Freshly juiced lemonade is awesome. But drinking lemonade everyday and all day long, a little less awesome.
What the next best thing? I cooked my dinners with lemon. I made lemon pasta, baked lemon chicken and a whole bunch of salad dressing.
Still I had some lemon left! I did say I had a HUGE bag of lemons.
I have never baked with lemon before but I do remember a pastry I once had which had some really yummy lemon curd in it.
I'm no fancy pastry chef, so I had to think of something else to have the lemon curd with.
So lemon cake it was! I looked through all my recipe books and surfed the net for some lemon cake recipes.
I selected a few that sounded great in my mind and made my first lemon cake. It was a loaf cake, kinda like a pound cake.
It wasn't too bad at all, especially when eaten with the fresh lemon curd I made to go along with it.
My lemon cake has come a long long way since that first trial. I had changed and tested more recipes than I remember, not all were successful, some, well... weren't that great.
I tried the creaming method, the folding method, the loaf shape, the bundt shape, the round shape, the layered cake and so on.
In the end, I found the recipe that was finally happy with. Its moist, its not too light nor too heavy, mixed with lemon zest and poppy seed and drenched with fresh lemon juice once its out of the oven. More importantly, it has great lemon flavour. Top it off with the creamy buttery lemon curd, awesomeness!
I usually make mine now as one big bundt cake, or as mini baby bundt cakes so that I can fill up each individual cake with just the right amount of lemon curd to satisfy each mouthful, YUMS!
Since then, when I do get some fresh lemons, I make... Lemonade? What lemonade?
