Polish poppy seed sheet cake: creamed, marbled, no yeast and no rolling
All the pleasure of makowiec without the roll and without waiting for dough to rise. Poppy seed scalded in milk and ground twice, bound with semolina, spooned into a creamed butter batter and dragged through with a knife into a marble. Forty-five minutes in the oven and sixteen squares that keep four days in a tin.
Your own work in that: 40 min.
- Poppy seed scalding 40 min
- Grinding and filling 15 min
- Creaming 25 min
- Baking 45 min
- Cooling 60 min
Step by step
0 / 8 doneScald the poppy seed
Rinse the poppy seed in a fine sieve. Bring the milk to the boil, add the seed and simmer 20 minutes, stirring now and then. Take off the heat, cover and leave another 20 minutes. Drain in a muslin-lined sieve and squeeze dry.
Ingredients: 250 g blue poppy seeds · 500 ml milk · 80 g honey · 80 g raisins · 50 g candied orange peel · 2 tbsp semolina
TipScalding softens the hard hulls so the grinder can crush the seeds into a smooth, moist paste; it also rinses off dust and softens any bitterness. Poppy seed ground dry gives a drier, grittier filling.
Twenty minutes simmering, twenty coveredGrind twice
Pass the squeezed seed through a grinder on the finest plate twice. The test: rub a little between your fingers — it should be a smooth paste with no grit. Still gritty? A third pass.
Finest plate, two passesBind the mass
Cover the raisins with boiling water for 5 minutes and drain. In a saucepan mix the ground poppy seed with the honey, semolina, raisins and chopped peel. Warm 5 minutes over low heat, stirring, until it thickens and pulls away from the base. Cool completely.
TipThe semolina binds the moisture you cannot squeeze out. Without it the poppy seed gives that water back into the batter, and instead of a marble you get a grey, sodden band.
Thick mass pulling from the pan baseCream the butter and sugar
Heat the oven to 175 °C and line the tin with paper. Beat the soft butter with the sugar and vanilla sugar 5 minutes, until pale and fluffy. Add the yolks one at a time, beating half a minute after each.
Ingredients: 200 g butter · 180 g sugar · 1 tbsp vanilla sugar · 4 pcs eggs · 250 g plain flour · 2 tsp baking powder · 100 ml milk · 1 pinch salt
TipThe butter must be soft but not melted: a finger goes in without resistance while the block holds its shape. Melted butter cannot hold air and the cake bakes dense.
Five minutes, pale and fluffyAdd the flour and the whites
Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt. Fold it into the butter mass on the lowest speed, alternating with the milk, only until combined. Whip the whites to stiff peaks and fold them in with a spatula in three additions, bottom to top.
TipThe whipped whites are not decoration: the poppy mass weighs almost as much as the batter and presses down on it. Without them the layer under the poppy seed turns dense and heavy.
Three additions of whites, folded from the bottomAssemble and marble
Spread two thirds of the batter in the tin. Spoon the cold poppy mass over it in dollops, cover with the rest of the batter and drag a knife through in an S-curve four or five times. No more: too many passes turn a marble into a uniformly grey slab.
Dollops of poppy seed, four passes of the knifeBake
175 °C, conventional, middle shelf, 45 minutes. Push the skewer into the pale part of the cake, not into the poppy seed: the poppy stays moist and will always mark the skewer. If the top darkens after 30 minutes, cover with foil.
Forty-five minutes, skewer in the pale partCool and glaze
Cool in the tin for about an hour, until completely cold. Stir the icing sugar with the lemon juice into a thick glaze (add a teaspoon of water if needed) and drizzle it over. Cut into 16 squares. Keeps 4 days in a tin and stays moist.
Ingredients: 150 g icing sugar · ½ pcs lemon, juice
Glaze on a cold cake, sixteen squares
Before you start
From ready-made poppy filling
A 500 g can replaces the poppy seed, milk, honey and dried fruit. Mix it with 2 spoons of semolina and warm it 5 minutes to firm it up — shop fillings are much looser than a homemade one.
Layered instead of marbled
Half the batter, all the poppy mass in an even layer, the rest of the batter on top, no knife. The cut surface then shows three clean layers.
The poppy sank to the bottom
The filling was too loose or still warm. Semolina and cooling the filling completely prevent it: warm filling melts the butter in the batter, which then cannot hold up the heavy poppy seed.
