Controversy Abounds

One thing I have come to learn recently about food is this: a lot of people don’t like a lot of things! And I’m not talking weird foods like horse meat, or squid ink. I’m talking run of the mill things like peanut butter, tomatoes, bread and cheese. I mean, I guess I always knew that – heck, I don’t think there was a pickier kid than me (I would only eat chicken tenders, fries and peas). But luckily, I grew out of it and now love most of the things I abhorred as a child.

And this is the dilemma I ran into this week with my baking. Already, I was having a hard time just coming up with something to bake. Seemed I was over my cupcake obsession and the usual chocolate chip cookies just weren’t up to par. So after a discussion with my friend about “old-fashioned” baked goods, I got excited about making lemon poppy seed bread. I love the combination of lemon and poppy seed in any form. Bread, scones, I’m sure I’d even love it in ice cream. It’s like a ridiculously clean little piece of heaven in your mouth - so you can see why I got so excited about making it.

However, it dawned on me that poppy seeds are one of those controversial ingredients in baking. To some people, there is no worse punishment than having to pick tiny, little, black poppy seeds out of your teeth for the rest of the day. So my excitement quickly deflated as I realized I may not have an audience for my baking this week! However I still decided to go ahead with it, since I have never made lemon poppy seed bread before and would love to find my go-to recipe.

The recipe I used is once again from the allrecipes website and I only changed up a couple small things.

Lemon Poppy Seed Bread

Adapted from Allrecipes.com and makes 2 loaves

3 cups all purpose flour

1 ½ tsp baking powder

¼ cup poppy seeds

2 cups white sugar

1 1/8 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 ½ cup milk

Juice and zest of 1 lemon

Directions

1. Preheat over to 325 degrees Fahrenheit and grease two loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl mix flour, baking powder, poppy seeds and sugar. Add in the eggs, milk, oil, and lemon (juice and zest). Mix until smooth. Pour batter into prepared pans.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 75 minutes or until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool loaves on a wire rack.

I adapted the recipe based on the reviews people gave on the allrecipes website. I cut back the sugar by half a cup, increased the poppy seeds to ¼ cup  and added freshly squeezed lemon juice and the zest.

I also changed the baking temperature and time, since I originally had the bread in the oven for 50 minutes at 350 and it was getting rather dark around the edges! So I think lowering the temperature by 35 degrees and extending the cooking time would help with that.

It has a nice subtle lemony flavour that you could pump up if you added the zest and juice of another lemon. It isn’t too sweet, but I’m tempted to dust it with icing sugar like the loaves you can get from Starbucks. The texture is nice and light and I will definitely keep this recipe as my lemon poppy seed recipe.

To get back to my story of poppy seed controversy, I ended up asking around and found that everyone I talked to actually liked lemon poppy seed bread – which surprised me! And rekindled my excitement for baking this week.

In the end, I realized that not everyone is going to love everything I bake (and more often than not I assume they won’t). But really that doesn’t matter. Right now, I’m baking because it’s something I love and it makes me happy – so I should bake things that will get me towards that goal. If I decide to open a bakery at some point, then maybe I’ll have to care what other people think – but for now I can do whatever I want!