This poppy seed cake comes from a handwritten cookery book of the Ripper family from Bölten (Belotin) in the Sudetenland. The family was expelled from the so-called "Kuhländchen" (Moravia) after the Second World War in August 1946 and settled in Runkel/Hesse. The original recipe uses the measurement in decagrams that was common in Austria and Bohemia and Moravia at the time. A shortcrust pastry base was not included in the recipe for the poppy seed cake, as this was assumed to be known. There was a shortcrust pastry recipe in the same cookery book, but unfortunately large parts of it have been lost forever due to the brittle paper. For this reason, we are using a comparable poppy seed tart shortcrust pastry base, which is recommended in Sophie Wilhelmine Scheibler's General German Cookery Book for All Estates, published in 1894.
For the shortcrust pastry:
375 grams flour
170 grams butter, cold
100-120 grams sugar
Zest of one small lemon
1 egg
2 egg yolks
1 egg yolk, hard-boiled and passed through a sieve
For the cake filling:
210 grams butter
250 grams of sugar
7 eggs
1 vanilla pod
100 grams brown almonds, ground
960 grams poppy seeds, freshly ground
1. Mix all the dough ingredients very quickly to form a smooth dough.
2. Scald the 960 g poppy seeds with boiling water.
2. Then finely grate the strained poppy seeds in a poppyseed grinding bowl or a poppy seed mill.
3. Add the sugar and melted butter.
4. Stir in the 7 egg yolks, the vanilla pulp and the ground almonds.
5. Finally, fold the 7 stiffly beaten egg whites into the poppy seed mixture.
6. Spread the poppy seed mixture over the shortcrust pastry in the tin.
7. Bake the tart in a moderately hot oven at 180 °C for about 30 minutes until nicely coloured.
Tip: If you don't have a poppy seed grinder or poppy seed mill, you can use a high-performance blender as an alternative.
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