Lemon Poppy Seeds Butter Cake

The original recipe is orange and chocolate chip cake and it's half of what I made here. I increased the batter because I have a 9 inch cake ring instead of small mini loaves pans. So I end up having a big cake and 5 muffin size cakes. :)
I didn't make any icing for it. Generally I will try to cut down the sugar in my cake. But with this cake, you could squeeze the lemon juice (the naked lemon that we have scrap off it's skin) and add a couple tablespoon of sugar and heat it up to make a lemon syrup and brush it on top of the cake when it just come out from the oven. Yum~


Adapted from recipes+, August 2010 issue 24 (mini Jaffa loaves)
Makes 1 9inch round cake and 5 muffins

Ingredients:

• 1 whole finely grated lemon zest
• 1 3/4 cup fine brown sugar
• 300g butter (room temperature)
• 3 cups self raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 2 tsp poppy seeds
• 4 eggs (room temperature)
• 1 cup milk (I use organic unsweetened soy milk here)

Method:

1. Butter and lightly flour your cake pan, line the base with baking paper.
2. Preheat oven to 160C/140C fan forced.
3. Beat the butter on low speed for 2 minutes and add brown sugar. Turn the speed to medium speed for about 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Then, add eggs one at a time and continue beating. (Beat each of the egg about 1 min before adding the next). Add in lemon zest and vanilla essence.
4. Turn the speed to low before adding the flour. Add flour and milk alternately for 4 times. Add in poppy seeds. Continue to use low speed to beat the batter until well blended and smooth. Transfer batter into the pan (half full of the cake pan). The rest of the batter can scoop into muffin cups.
5. Place on the pan in the center rack of preheat oven and bake at 50mins-1hr or until a cake tester comes out dry. Transfer the cake to a cooling rack for about 10 minutes before removing from pans.

p/s: Muffin size cake cook faster, test the doneness about 20 mins after you baked in the oven. If the skewer comes out clean, remove from the oven and continue to bake the 9 inch round cake.