Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Saint-Pierre Poppy Seed Cake

January 22, 2019 at 12:01 am | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 Comments
Tags: baking, cake

It’s been a while since we’ve made a simple loaf cake from BCM, and Saint-Pierre Poppy Seed Cake was an easy one to pull off this week. Rather than the standard lemon-poppy seed combo, this uses orange, and the result is a very sunny and not too sweet tea cake. It’s a rich cake, though. In addition to butter and poppy seeds, the batter also contains a good amount of heavy cream.

When I buy organic citrus, I try to remember to freeze the zest if I’ve not already planned to use it. I have a little baggie with packets of various zests in my freezer drawer and I dipped into that here to find some orange zest. Since I was using the frozen zest, I also needed to find some juice. My juice turned out to be Grand Marnier…I guess I’m lucky I don’t have scurvy.

Dorie is not shy with the poppy seeds here– the full recipe has a whole 1/3 cup of them, so make sure they’re fresh or they’ve been properly stored (airtight and in the freezer, as she recommends). Unlike most poppyseed muffin recipes, where I often feel like the couple of tablespoons of seeds are mostly there for looks, you can taste them in this cake, and they crunch. Dorie says this tea cake is meant to be served plain, but I can never resist a little dressing up, so I took home a few slices of candied clementines from work to garnish my pieces.

For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

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Your cake looks terrific- the candied clementines area nice touch.

Comment by Cakelaw— January 22, 2019 #

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Love the addition of the candied clementines!

Comment by Mardi (eat. live. travel. write.)— January 22, 2019 #

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I love the garnish! How pretty! This was a lovely cake.

Comment by lovielou— January 22, 2019 #

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This was definitely a crunchy cake. Thanks for the tips on freezing citrus zest and poppy seeds.

Comment by Diane Zwang— January 22, 2019 #

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Grand Marnier? Oh, yes, that would be good in this cake.

Comment by Zosia— January 23, 2019 #

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Definite crunch on this one! The clementine adds to the simple elegance…beautiful.

Comment by isthisakeeper— January 29, 2019 #

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Don’t think I have ever tried an orange poppy seed cake and it sounds and looks delicious!

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 12:02 AM a whisk and a spoon wrote:

> steph (whisk/spoon) posted: ” It’s been a while since we’ve made a simple > loaf cake from BCM, and Saint-Pierre Poppy Seed Cake was an easy one to > pull off this week. Rather than the standard lemon-poppy seed combo, this > uses orange, and the result is a very sunny and not too sweet t” >

Comment by saffronandhoney— February 15, 2019 #

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