Poppyseed Cake

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.

Method:

  1. Mix all the dough ingredients very quickly to form a smooth dough.
  2. Scald the 960 g poppy seeds with boiling water.
  3. Then finely grate the strained poppy seeds in a poppy seed grinding bowl or a poppy seed mill.
  4. Add the sugar and melted butter.
  5. Stir in the 7 egg yolks, the vanilla pulp and the ground almonds.
  6. Finally, fold the 7 stiffly beaten egg whites into the poppy seed mixture.
  7. Spread the poppy seed mixture over the short crust pastry in the tin.
  8. 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.