Cake # 13 Honey and Poppy Seed Ring

As I am typing this I am watching my daughter get into everything in my computer room, the books, papers, her nose; meanwhile, I am singing "Old McDonald" to her, and I find myself wondering was there really an "Old McDonald" who had a farm? Because I cannot sing that song without replacing a old man with a beard and overalls with a younger one, who has flaming red hair, is wearing a yellow jumpsuit, and looks sort of like a clown. Somehow inbetween chasing her around the house and stopping her from all sorts of impending doom a house contains, I manage to make cake number thirteen.

Now I have never been the superstitious type, I love the number thirteen because it has the number three in it, so it is automatically good in my book. Plus, Friday the thirteenth is one of my all-time favorite cheesy horror movies, so I had no qualms with baking cake number thirteen, the Honey and Poppy Seed Ring cake. Speaking of rings, there was a lot of cake and a lot of rings to be had this weekend. On Friday, my twin brother got married to his beautiful fiance. They looked amazing and the ceremony was a lot of fun - my mom actually made their wedding cake:

She did an excellent job- maybe there is where I get my cake baking from. Anyway, the cake I baked for today was much different from this wedding cake - no icing, no flowers, and definitely not fancy, in fact this cake was much more akin to a sweet bread, especially because of the poppy seeds! I was thrilled to use poppy seeds, it is one of the few McCormick "spices" I have on my spice rack that had never been opened before, so it was nice to actually use it. Besides poppy seeds, this cake called for flour, sugar, eggs, butter, lemon juice, honey, vanilla, and baking powder. It was an exceptionally easy cake to make- I was able to hold Evie and make most of the cake, she had fun licking the spatula when I was finished. At 3:13 I happened to finish the cake, and somewhere in the back of my mind a signal was going off that this was my thirteenth cake and that I finished it at 3:13, but the alarm wasn't loud enough for me to pay attention to. I should have listened...

Here is what the Poppy Seed Ring looks like in my cake book:

Here is what my cake looked like before I cut it:

Here is what the cake looked like when I cut it:

And here is what the cake looked like all over my daughter's face and hair when she grabbed a piece behind my back when I wasn't looking:

Not a terrible, typical, "thirteen", tragedy. Actually very cute, and I wish I captured the devilish grin that my child gave me when she was found caught with cake in her face.

Next week, on to the Lemon Drizzle Loaf.