Wheats and Sweets: Orange and Poppy seed cake

Sometimes I just want to bake something really simple that I don't have to faff around with icing etc. This is my go-to cake. So as my first bake of the new house I thought i'd throw it together, only problem, I'd run out of poppy seeds, which shouldn't have been a massive problem but I couldn't find any in Chorlton! We tried so many places but no where had them, every seed imaginable, but no poppy seeds! So I ended up having to drive for half an hour to get some, bit ridiculous but once I have something in my head it has to happen. (true in my baking life and normal life)

The first thing to do for this cake is to soak the seeds in warm milk, I love this step, the milk is so concentrated with seeds that it makes the best consistency.

Then simply zest two or three oranges, I just used a grater as I don't have a zester (its in my dream kitchen at the moment) so you need to be careful to just get the nice top layers of zest, not the horrible bitter underneath.

After that it should be pretty straight forward, cream the butter and sugar, add the flour and eggs and mix in the milk. Should be straightforward. But when the motor on your hand held mixer burns out (the 3rd one this year) and you have to do this all by hand, its not so easy. Don't get me wrong, its possible, and I baked for many years without a handheld mixer, but it just takes so much longer and much more effort. There are certain things that I like because they take time and effort, bread making for example, but creaming butter and sugar is just dull.

One day, this guy will be mine, and hopefully not in the too far distant future. But it costs £400 minimum, and that is a bit much right now...One for the dream kitchen.

Anyway, back to the cake, I eventually got it all mixed in!

Love the way this mixture looks, bit like frogspawn?

And it went into one of my favourite tins, a star shape from Ikea:

The first time baking in a new oven is always difficult, temperatures vary so much. This one seems to be relatively true to the thermostat, maybe a little bit higher. So it was perhaps ever so slightly overcooked, but this cake is so moist due to the milk so it didn't suffer too much for it.