Life Is Uncertain, Eat Dessert First....

I know how important it is to eat healthy and I basically do try to prepare healthy meals for my family but one area that I suppose could use some improvement in the health department is dessert. Not that I'm going to get that request from my family as they all pretty much have a good healthy sweet tooth. Actually, I think my husband and youngest have ALL sweet teeth in their mouths! I have made some pretty rich ones lately, French Silk Pie -although one of them (yes, I made it twice in a row) I made with a heavy cream substitute of regular 1% milk and cornstarch and the difference in calories/fat was dramatically less (but not the taste) so that made me feel really good! So after 2 silk pies and 2 pans of Cream Puff Cake (ooh, I will get to that later!) I decided to make a little lighter dessert, Orange Poppyseed Tea Cake. It's not light and fluffy like a birthday cake but more dense, but absolutely deelish.... and beautiful! I love poppy seed and usually it's paired with lemon or almond (which I'm not fond of either) so the orange appealed to me.

Doesn't it look too pretty to cut into? The recipe can be found here but I did make a few changes to the recipe. I didn't splurge the $8 for the vanilla bean paste, I just used the same amount of pure Vanilla extract. I used a 9" round cake pan, 14 tbsp of butter and baked it at 325 for 55 minutes. For the frosting, 250 grams of cream cheese equals like an 8 oz block plus almost 1 more ounce, but I just used the one block. You can really frost it any way you want but I just like to mess around making stuff pretty. :) After all that, this is what you get to reward yourself with:

Since it's a tea cake but I'm not a tea drinker,  I must admit I had a piece for breakfast with my coffee.

And here's a purple one I made for my mom's birthday a few days later....

And, here is a pink one I did at the request of my girlfriend for her daughter's birthday. It's not the lemon tea cake (a chocolate and vanilla checkerboard) but also the rose frosting.

checkerboard inside!

little batter leftover for some cupcakes!