Recipe Review - Lemon Poppy Seed Cake

This is terribly late to post because I actually made this for Easter, but I finally found the pictures and worked out some recipe tweaks, so better late than never. I'm thinking still in time for Mother's Day for those of you that may have a cake like this for the holiday weekend. It is certainly delicious. I would never use a box mix again for a lemon poppy seed cake. That's for sure! Oh, and you WILL need a bundt pan for this. Enjoy!

Lemon Poppy Seed Cake 

Ingredients for the cake - 3 eggs, 1 1/8 c oil, 1 1/2 c milk, 2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp butter flavoring/extract, 2 1/4 c sugar, 3 c flour, 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 1/2 tsp poppy seeds

Ingredients for glaze - 1/2 c lemon juice (ideally fresh), 1 1/2 c powdered sugar, 2 tsp butter flavoring/extract, 2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp vanilla

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Prepare your pan by greasing and flouring thoroughly.

Beat the first 5 ingredients (all the wet ingredients) for the cake. In a seperate bowl, mix the 5 dry cake ingredients together. Incrementally add the dry to the wet, mixing as you go to combine. Pour your batter into your prepared bundt pan and give it a little tap to get any air bubbles out. Pop it in your preheated oven and turn your attention to making the glaze. The cake is done in about an hour when it is golden brown and starting to crack on the top. For me, it was just about 65 minutes to perfection.

For the glaze, just mix all your ingredients together in a bowl. Feel free to add a bit more lemon if you want! Set aside to pour over your cake while it is still piping hot. I've found that the cake soaks up much more of the glaze (and looks prettier) to pour the glaze on while the cake is still in the pan, and then pop it out of the pan, but you can pour the glaze over the top if you want.. or even get the cake out of the pan and then flip it over to glaze the bottom. I've not had an issue getting the cake out of the pan, so I prefer to just let it soak until I'm going to serve. Yum!

When the cake is out of the oven and HOT, use a chopstick or grill skewer and poke the heck out of the cake! Then, poke it some more! Slowly, pour the glaze all over the cake, letting it soak in as you go. Pop the cake out of the pan and fight the urge to eat a slice while it's still warm. Wait, don't fight the urge! Do eat a piece warm out of the oven.. delish! I serve mine with a dump sprinkle of powdered sugar, but that's up to your preference. You can do that by the slice or the whole cake.. whatever works. It's delicious with or without.

Not that you'll have leftovers, but it does keep remarkably well in a covered container because it is so moist. Having said that, you may have done something wrong if you have leftovers at all! The cake, with it's appearance of heaviness, is actually light and refreshing.. maybe it's the lemon. Maybe it's a trick my mind plays so I can indulge in a second 'tiny' slice. Either way, it's delicious!