Super SMS: Whole Orange-Poppy Seed Cake and Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake with Cornmeal Crust

This week’s Sweet Melissa Sunday treat was Whole Orange-Poppy Seed Cake. Much like the Tartest Lemon Tart Tuesdays With Dorie made a couple months back, this recipe utilizes an entire citrus fruit, which gets pulverized in the food processor. Though I had fun making the lemon tart, I didn’t like the dessert all that much, so I was glad to have another opportunity to make a treat with this somewhat unusual method. I decided to make muffins rather than a cake for dual purposes: getting breakfast ready faster and being able to bring the leftovers to work tomorrow. The recipe yielded twelve large muffins, which took twenty-two minutes to bake, and twelve minis, which took about fifteen minutes. I also reduced the butter a bit. The recipe called for a stick and a half: I used one stick and four tablespoons of nonfat plain yogurt. I think Dorie Greenspan’s French Lemon Yogurt Cake is spectacular and figured a little yogurt wouldn’t harm this citrus concoction, either.



I am happy to say that I enjoyed this cake. It was moist and light, with pleasant bursts of orange flavor. (My dog liked it too. I carelessly left the plate from the photo shoot unattended for two entire minutes and when I came back into the kitchen, two of the large muffins and four of the mini muffins were missing.) I gave this recipe a 7.8 for Deliciousness and a 2 for Effort, giving it an EDR of 3.9. Many thanks to Melissa of Lulu the Baker for selecting this great and easy (very welcome this week) recipe. You can find the recipe here on her baking site and be sure to check out her adorable Etsy shop as well. To see what the other SMS bakers thought of the recipe, visit the SMS blogroll.



And I still need to catch up with my posting for last week’s SMS recipe, which was Lemon Blueberry Cheesecake with Cornmeal Crumble Crust. I was out of town, so the cheesecake was baked, photographed, and consumed two weeks ago. I had good intentions to write up my post before I left, but there’s always a few things that fall by the wayside right before a trip and the post was one of them. Mr. Penpen was happy one of those things wasn’t the huge tray of lasagna I left for him to eat while I was gone. Anyway, we’re not huge cheesecake fans around here (I mean, you can’t really pair cheesecake with ice cream), but the combination of lemon and blueberries sounded appealing, so I figured I’d give it a try. I skipped the cheesecake TWD made in December and decided that as long as I was making one mini cheesecake, I may as well make a second and try Dorie’s.


I brought the cheesecakes to Mr. Penpen’s parents’ house on the Fourth of July – along with some other goodies – and they were quite well-received. I preferred the lemon blueberry cheesecake (especially the sauce – yum!) and Mr. Penpen liked the more traditional cheesecake. A big thank you to Eliana of A Chica Bakes for getting me to try something new. You can find the recipe for the lemon cheesecake on her site. Oh, and since I had leftover filling from both cheesecakes, so I supplemented them with remnants of other dairy products and some more lemon zest, mixed it up, and ran the mixture through my ice cream maker. I think the accidental cheesecake ice cream may have actually been the favorite of the three!