Lemon, poppy seed and basil loaf cake

One of my favourite cake flavour combinations has to be Lemon and Poppy seed. In the past, I've made gluten-free lemon and poppy seed cupcakes and even a vegan version of a lemon and poppy seed cake for GBBO's Vegan week bake along back in 2018. 

Lately I've been really into baking loaf-cakes. They seem to have a reliability about them that I don't seem to master with a circular shaped cake! So it made sense to try a lemon and poppy seed loaf cake. To give it an extra flavour twist I also included some finely chopped fresh basil. 

If I can get away with it, I often try to reduce the amount of sugar and fat in cake recipes. So I got away with 100g of caster sugar in this recipe and used a combination of greek yogurt and butter so that I didn't need loads of butter. Both of these tweaks seemed to work out well. 

Ingredients:

125g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

100g caster sugar

50g butter - room temperature

50g greek yogurt

2 large eggs

Juice of half a lemon and zest of a lemon

20g poppy seeds

A few leaves of fresh basil - finely chopped (plus extra for garnish)

A little icing sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice to decorate if desired (or a drop of gin mixed with icing sugar for an extra treat) 

Method:

The method really was as simple as combining everything together in the stand mixer, pouring into a lined loaf tin and popping in a pre-heated oven at 160C for 35-40 minutes. It actually took 42 minutes in my oven. 

I put the poppy seeds into the mix last but everything else went in at the same time.

I've found that if I use a loaf-tin liner then I don't even need to grease the tin first whereas with baking paper I do tend to grease the tin too. 

The trouble with the loaf shaped cakes is that between the 5 of us, they dissappear rather quickly - A generous sized slice each and it's gone or two thinner slices each if we're trying to eat less of it each time.