Purple Poppy Seed Cake

Citrus is one of my favourite kitchen smells and so I was thrilled when I was able to recreate an old lemon loaf favourite, given to me years ago by my old friend Chris P.  I altered my old recipe, added ideas from recipes on line, and ended up with a very moist, uniquely purple, Lemon Poppy Seed cake.  Although it may seem odd to eat purple cake, the poppy seeds and lemon bits look rather pretty floating together.  One thing that I would change from what I originally did, and that is to NOT add any glaze.  The purple sweet potato flour seems to retain a lot of moisture and adding a sugar-lemon mix to the top just made the cake too gooey.  I may try this recipe again with banana flour instead of purple flour and see if the glaze works better.  My kitchen is pretty much like a laboratory right now, and for every success (or semi-success) 2 or 3 things end up in the garbage.  This cake actually smelled good while baking...not a common thing in this house right now.  I think the difference is that I made a rice flour mix altering a flour recipe from http://glutenfreegirl.com/recipes/ rather than using a store-bought mixture*.

Gluten-Free/Dairy Free Lemon Poppy Seed Cake
1/2 cup hazelnut or almond milk
6 tbsp vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
2 medium eggs

1 1/2 cups flour mix*
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp xanthan gum or guar gum
1/4 tsp salt

2 1/2 tbsp poppy seeds
zest of 1 x-large lemon
juice of 1 lemon (fresh)

Turn oven on to 350 degrees (or no. 4 mark on gas dial).  Mix first 4 ingredients well with electric mixer.  Sift flour mix*, baking powder, gum, and salt together 3 times to 'fluff' dry ingredients.  Add to liquid mixture, then add poppy seeds and lemon zest/juice and stir all with wooden spoon until dry is just mixed into wet.
Pour into a greased & floured 10" round cake pan, bake 40 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean (do not undercook or again, it goes gooey). 
Cool then glaze (optional).

Glaze
1/3 cup white sugar
juice from one lemon
Mix together with a spoon until sugar dissolves.

*Rice flour mix:  1 cup brown rice flour, 1 cup white rice flour, 2/3 cup purple sweet potato flour (I substituted for potato starch) and 1/3 cup tapioca starch.

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading