Feijoa Poppy Seed Cake

I was complaining to a friend who recently made a lemon poppy seed cake that it wasn’t that easy to buy poppy seeds in the  local super markets, or maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place. She kindly dropped a packet off to me and I embarked on my first ever lemon poppy seed cake, something I have always wanted to make but for some reason never have. Well it didn’t happen this time either, as I turned to the fruit bowl to get the lemons I didn’t get past the feijoas. So what would the two main ingredients taste like together? The easiest way to find out was to cut a feijoa in half, scoop out the flesh and sprinkle with poppy seeds. It tasted good to me so I embarked on my cake. i still have some seeds left so I will get to make that lemon version one day!

I used my traditional sponge recipe, added the additional ingredients and some more flour to compensate for the extra fruit. The feijoa flavour came through nicely but wasn’t too intense and the crunch of the poppy seeds was delicious.

Ingredients – cake

• 200g butter
• 200g castor sugar
• 250g self raising flour
• 3 eggs
• 100g feijoa pulp blended to smooth (approx 8 feijoas)

Ingredients – syrup

• 50g icing sugar
• pulp of 2 feijoas, blended to smooth

Method

1. Pre heat oven to 180C and grease & flour a 24cm loose bottom cake tin
2. Place butter & sugar in a bowl and beat with an electric whisk or good old fashioned wooded spoon until light and fluffy.
3. Add one egg at a time and whisk in between additions.
4. Add feijoa pulp and beat into mixture.
5. Sift flour into mixture and fold gently through with a metal spoon so not to loose all the air that has been beaten in.
6. Spoon mixture into the cake tin.
7. Bake in oven for 40-45 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out of the sponge clean.
8. Allow to cool before removing from tin.
9. Mix together the two ingredients for the syrup and drizzle over cake.