Poppy Seed Pound Cake with Brown Butter Glaze

This bundt cake with poppy seed filling is a surprisingly "Old World” recipe for these authors “ though I suppose adding cream cheese to the batter and glazing the cake with a brown butter icing makes it much less so.

The vanilla cake was dense, moist and very rich with a whisper of orange flavour and a little tanginess from the cheese. The poppy seed filling was moist and not too sweet……. the cake itself was delicious.

I wish I could say the same for the glaze, a confectioners’ sugar based icing with melted browned butter, orange juice and rind. I had to add more liquid than the recipe called for to make it pourable, I suspect because my kitchen was quite cool and the butter was firming up in the glaze. Of course I ended up taking it a little too far and making it too thin. I used it as is rather than adding more sugar and was quite happy that most of the glaze ran off the cake because I didn’t like it at all…..I don’t mind using browned butter in my baked goods, but I really don’t like it poured on top. Other family members didn’t mind it, but it definitely wasn’t a hit.

I would give the cake 4 stars, but the glaze drops it down to an overall rating of 3 stars.