Poppyseed Cake: or, Have you been to the library lately?

Happy National Library Week!

Poppyseed Cake 2 tbsp lemon rind 1 cup sugar ½ cup (4 oz) cream cheese, softened ⅙ cup (8 tsp, or ⅓ of a stick) butter or stick margarine, softened ⅛ tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 large eggs 1 tsp vanilla 3 tbsp poppyseeds 1⅓ cups flour Heat oven to 325°. Grease an 8" square pan. Mix the lemon rind and sugar. Pinch them between your fingers so that the rind gets sanded against the sugar. This helps release the lemon flavor. Do this until the sugar is yellow and smells very lemony. Add the butter, cream cheese, salt, and baking powder. Cream until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Add the vanilla at the same time as one of the eggs. Mix in the poppyseeds, beat well. Add the flour, and stir just until mixed. Pour into the pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Frost the cake if desired, but it is very good uniced.        Icing: 2 tbsp cream cheese, softened 2 or 3 tbsp butter, softened* Pinch salt ¼ tsp lemon extract 1 egg white† Powdered sugar Wait until cake is completely cooled before making the icing. Beat cream cheese, butter, salt, lemon extract, egg white, and about ¾ cup powdered sugar until very smooth. Gradually add powdered sugar, beating well, until the icing is thick enough to hold a shape and spreads easily. *You can just use the remainder of the butter stick that's leftover from the cake. †If you are worried about raw egg whites in the icing, you can either use pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs, or you can use 2 tablespoons of carton egg whites. As always when using carton egg whites, shake the carton immediately before measuring. Adapted from Cooking Light

This year, National Library Week started off with the astronomical wonder of a lifetime. The moon and stars above give honor to public libraries, and so should we. Have you been to your local library lately?

As more and more people have noted, libraries are one of the last remaining places where no one expects you to spend money! In the past few decades, they have become community centers (and purveyors of eclipse glasses as of April 8, 2024) as well as places to get books. You should check your library's social media pages if you haven't. You will likely be surprised at all the events they're hosting- and almost all of them are free!

Speaking of events at the local library, I would be remiss not to share this:

I'm not the first person to say this: We do not deserve librarians.

And of course, libraries are the best place to find a librarian. When you can't find the answer to a question after hours of failed internet searching, a librarian will find it in half an instant. This brings us to why we salute libraries today.

My mother used to subscribe to Cooking Light magazine, and a lot of recipes from various issues made regular appearances on our dinner table. She cancelled her subscription when they went upscale with their recipes. Our house was on a Better Homes And Gardens budget, but Cooking Light started catering to the Real Simple crowd. Apparently upscale diet recipes weren't as popular as affordable ones, because Cooking Light quietly folded in 2018.

All of this brings us to today's recipe. The magazine had a feature where they'd take a reader-submitted recipe and cut the calories. One month, they reworked someone's grandmother's poppyseed cake. We clipped the recipe and made it many times. It tasted ever-so-slightly different than any other poppyseed cake I've ever had. Unfortunately, when I recently wanted to make it again, I found out that we no longer have the recipe. Mom got rid of a lot of cookbooks and food magazines she doesn't use anymore, including all of her back issues of Cooking Light.

No amount of trawling the internet produced the poppyseed cake. The magazine's website has long fallen off the internet. While there are a few Cooking Light recipes floating around online, the poppyseed cake is not among them. I tried finding the recipe on the Internet Archive's copy of Cooking Light's website, but that was futile. I added poppyseeds and lemon extract to Mrs. Wilson's one-egg cake, which was very delicious (seriously, you should try it) but just not the same.

And so, I contacted the local library. I could have gone in-person, but the weather was too unpleasant to traverse a parking lot. So, from the climate-controlled comfort of the sofa, I went to the library's website, found their chat link, and asked if they could find the recipe for this poppyseed cake I had not made in ages. The first line of my note was "Hello! I'm requesting a bit of librarian sleuthing." The library had closed a few hours prior, but I figured that my message would wait until the next day.

Only half an hour later, a reply came through: "Thank you and we love a good challenge. I've got the information needed and we'll get to work to see what we can find." Only fifteen minutes after that, I received a scan of the magazine page bearing the poppyseed cake recipe! Never underestimate librarians, especially if they are monitoring the reference chat after hours.

Source: Cooking Light magazine

You may think it's a little hard to read the numbers in the ingredient amounts- particularly the fractions. But because librarians think of everything, they sent a higher-resolution scan of just the recipe.

 

After only a short glance at the recipe, I found out what made this poppyseed cake so different from any other I've ever tasted. It uses half butter and half cream cheese in the batter. This meant that after making the cake, we would have a partial brick of cream cheese in the freezer waiting for us to find a use for it. But my desire for poppyseed cake would not be stopped by the menace of small edible ingredients accumulating in the back of the freezer.

I may be veering off the recipe directions, but one cookbook writer recommended that you sand your lemon rind against the sugar by pinching the two ingredients together with your fingers until the sugar is yellow. This releases the lemon flavor a lot better than if you merely stirred it in. I've done it ever since.

I've since found that if you don't mind the extra dishes, you can simply drop the lemon rind and a few spoons of the sugar into an electric coffee grinder and get the same happy result. I didn't think I would ever have a use for an electric coffee grinder. I certainly would never have actually bought one-- not even at thrift-store prices. But since this one turned up in the cabinets, I've found it to be unexpectedly useful.

Anyway, we had creamed the butter and sugar, cracked in the first egg, and were ready to turn on the mixer when we realized we had forgotten to add the cream cheese.

I had tried to be organized and prepared with this recipe. I had all the ingredients measured out and waiting in a tidy row on the counter (or so I thought). I even remembered to set out the butter earlier in the day to soften, which practically never happens. However, I forgot to soften the cream cheese.

Fortunately, we had not ruined the recipe. We had merely caused our own slight inconvenience. But although the egg was already in the mixing bowl, I knew that if I beat it in before adding the cream cheese, I would end up with hard white cheese-clumps floating in an eggy sugar sludge. But with only a minor sacrifice of dignity, I could simply pour the egg back out of the mixing bowl with minimal mess.

The Mixmaster made short work of the refrigerator-hard cream cheese, and soon we had a mixing bowl full of what looked and tasted like a delicious whipped cheesecake.

Having actually remembered to add all our ingredients, we could finally proceed to the eggs as if we had gotten the recipe right the first time. The batter looked promisingly pretty.

I remembered this recipe using a massive heap of poppyseeds, and my memory did not lie. I've seen a lot of disappointing poppyseed cupcakes (or are they poppyseed muffins?) that barely contain enough poppyseeds to speckle them, but this recipe tells us to dump them into our batter with glorious abandon.

The batter was wonderfully thick, so much so that I feared that I had accidentally added too much flour. But the pan was prepared and the batter was mixed, so we could do nothing but get it into the oven and hope for the best. As a measuring note, the original recipe uses three eggs and I reduced it to two. Reducing all of the other ingredients by one third resulted in some perfect and tidy amounts. I didn't have to mutter to myself "What's one twelfth of a cup, anyway?"

I didn't get the batter perfectly smooth in the pan, but I should have. As we found out when we used cream cheese instead of butter in a cake, the batter simply will not spread. It holds its shape better than the stiffest of cookie dough. Those of you trying this at home (which you should) will want to do a better job of leveling off the batter than I did.

Now, I always liked this cake uniced. I distinctly remember deliberately choosing to omit the icing every time I made it. However, because I wanted to express appreciation for repairing the Mixmaster again, I asked the person who'd helped me get it back together if he wanted the cake frosted or bare. "I'd like icing on top."

I appreciate how the original recipe uses the entire brick of cream cheese. What doesn't go into the cake goes into the icing on top of it. However, I didn't want to have a heavy schmear of icing on this cake. (As aforementioned, I didn't want to ice it at all. But sometimes we must give into the demands of the adoring public.) This is why the icing in my typed recipe is different from the original one in the magazine.

I used the icing from my great-grandmother's cake, replacing half the butter with cream cheese. Since that icing uses so little butter, it comes out like a light doughnut glaze that happens to be able to hold a shape. I think it's so much better than heavy, over-rich buttercream. I think the icing works because it uses an egg white instead of milk or water. If I am right, the protein from the egg helps the icing keep its shape. I've seen people demonstrate how adding liquids to buttercream turns it into an irreparably runny mess by ruining the fat-sugar ratio (and also personally encountered the results), but they always use water or milk. They never use egg whites. As you can see, this icing holds its shape beautifully without containing enough butter to glue itself together.

And here is the beautiful cake, returned to my kitchen after far too long a deprivation. As soon as I tasted it, I was like "Yep! There it is! The recipe I've wanted back all this time!"

People rarely mention removing the cake from the pan, but I have to point out how easily this cake lifted right out. It didn't threaten to break apart or cling. Sometimes you need a spatula to support the whole slice as you raise it out of the pan, but for this cake you could practically pinch a slice on the sides and pluck it out.

In conclusion, this cake is absolutely delicious. It's so dense, and at the same time so wonderfully soft. The amount of lemon rind is just right. You owe it to yourself to try it. Though as aforementioned, I think it's better uniced. All those lovely delicate flavors in the cake come through a lot better when there's no icing on top.