I grew up partly in Israel, and one of my all time favorite desserts is poppy seed cake. Now, I don’t get to have poppy seed cake very often, anymore, and I don’t bake it, either, but it turns out that if you want to learn how to bake a poppy seed cake, there are a lot of very entertaining and instructive video demonstrations available on the web. There are also some excellent recipes.
This one is about the Polish version of a poppy seed cake: a makowiec. It is usually in the form of a roll or a loaf, and many bakeries in Israel produce similar rolls and loaves.
For a full recipe for a makowiec, try this article from the The Fresh Loaf. They’ve got a very appetizing photo of a poppy seed roll, which I’ve copied below.
This photo is from http://www.thefreshloaf.com/
My mother makes an excellent poppy seed cake, but it’s not a makowiec. It’s more like the one in this video:
Here is a full recipe for a lemon poppy see cake from All Recipes The photo below is from the recipe on All Recipes. It looks a lot like my mother’s poppy seed cake.
A lemon poppy seed cake from AllRecipes.com
Finally, it is also possible to find videos of Israelis baking cakes. This one starts out with a banana cake and continues with an orange babka poppy seed cake:
If you are looking for a recipe for a poppy seed cake in Hebrew, you can one find one here:
Do you want to make your own poppy seed cake at home? Here are some products that might help you to do so:
My mom made poppy cake a few times, and I loved it. We also had a local bakery that made decent poppy cake, not the mass produced kind.
I wish we had a bakery here that baked old fashioned poppy seed cake! You and I seem to have had some of the same experiences and tastes.