Lemon Poppy Seed Cupcakes

I’ve ogled at gorgeous cakes with blue poppy for a long time. I’ve bookmarked recipes just so that one day when I do get my hands on some blue poppy, I will use all those recipes. When I finally bought a bottle of blue poppy seeds on my trip last month, the first thing I wanted to bake were the lemon poppy seed muffins I saw in Baking From My Home to Yours. Each time I skimmed through the book, I gaped at the lemon muffins for a while before moving to the next page. This had to be the recipe I’d try with blue poppy seeds.

Although this recipe is meant for muffins, I’m not such a big fan of mixing the dry and wet seperately and then folding it together. While I stuck to to the ingredients; I mixed them as if I were making cakes – mixing the butter and sugar first, then adding in the flavourings, then the eggs, and finally folding in the dry ingedients alternately with the yoghurt. These gave me some incredibly moist cupcakes. When you’re eating them fresh out of the oven, you will enjoy biting into a light crust. Once it has cooled down, you can spoon some lemon icing over it – although the next time, I’d use just water or milk with sugar for the icing.

I absolutely loved how the cake turned out. It had beautiful texture with the poppy seeds adding their characteristic nuttyness. With yoghurt in the cake, you can NEVER go wrong. You will always get the softest, most delicate crumb. The one thing I learnt is that I’m not a huge fan of lemon flavouring. Even though I put half the quanity of zest and skipped the lemon juice in the cake, I found the fragrance of the lemon zest was enough to make me feel giddy. I need to find a new flavour to pair the poppy seeds with. Any suggestions?

2/3rd cup sugar

1 stick/100g butter, softened

2 eggs

Zest of 1 lemon

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp blue poppy seeds

2 cups all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4th tsp baking soda

1/4th tsp salt

3/4th cup yoghurt

Icing:

½ cup icing sugar

1-2 tbsp lemon juice or water

1. Preheat oven to 400°F/200°C. Grease 12 muffin cups.
2. In a large bowl mix together the sugar and butter with a stand mixer/hand mixer until light and creamy. About 3 minutes.
3. Add in the eggs one at a time, keeping a minute’s gap between each addition
4. Throw in the lemon zest and the vanilla extract. Stir in the poppy seeds.
5. Whisk together the dry ingredients.
6. Lower the speed and add the dry ingredients and the yoghurt alternately, 3 parts flour and 2 parts yoghurt, starting and ending with the flour. (flour-yoghurt-flour-yoghurt-flour!)
7. Pour the batter in the prepared moulds and gently even out the top.
8. Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a thin knife comes out clean.
9. Unmould the cupcakes after 5 minutes and gobble one up while you wait for the others to cool completely before icing (yes, you’ve got to wait or the icing will melt on the cake and will look ugly).
10. For the icing, stir the icing sugar with 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice until it’s moist. Add a little at a time and keep stirring with each addition to check if you’ve got the texture you’re looking for – white and creamy that is still thin enough to drizzle over the cupcakes.
11. Spoon the over the cupcakes. Eat it up!