my mother in law said I had to boil the poppyseeds to take that hard outer shell off before I can put them into my lemon cake batter. For anyone who has done this.....is the shell what floats on the top while boiling or is that what sinks to the bottom. It all seems like just tender poppyseeds to me!

giving you a bump until I get home to check my cookbooks for you.

thanks, I appreciate it. I'm lost on this one and I can't get a hold of my MIL, go figure .

My BIL used to make poppyseed cakes, and he never boiled the poppyseeds, but maybe there are some that need to be boiled. I've never used them, but really did like the cakes he made. Janice

I make Nati's lemon poppyseed buttercake recipe frequently, and I never do anything to the poppyseeds. Nor does her recipe call for anything to be done to them. They turn out fine.

Theresa

I've never boiled them before, but maybe I've been doing it wrong? I would guess that the shell would float to the top, since they would be hollow and empty, but that's just a guess.

I've never boiled poppyseeds before putting them in a cake and I haven't had any problems. Good luck!

In one of my baking classes, we used poppyseeds and we didn't boil them, we just added them in and there were no problems.

Well, I never heard of boiling them either and I wish I would have checked this thread again before I boiled them. UGGGG. I'm so mad at myself now, my MIL is old school on this stuff and I think I just got sucked into her evil web of being Marie of of EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND!!! She sometimes will do stuff like this to me on purpose, than again she is OLD SCHOOL may be this is the way SHE does it. I'm just using these poppyseeds anyways, now I just have to check around for a good tried and true lemon poppyseed poundcake. Thanks for shedding some light on this for me!

some recipes call for soaking the poppy seeds and some just use them as is.

ok, now I feel a little bit better after reading that last post.

I have a chicken casserole recipe that uses poppy seeds, and I've never soaked them.

I do an almond poppy seed cake and I do not boil them. I had heard of boiling before however and for some reason - they seem to sink in the cake and it looks like a poppy seed layer within the cake rather than distributed throughout. (that is what I was told anyway) I never boiled them for that reason. Good Luck!

Hey Mkolmar... you married the son of satan, too? I thought I was the only one! haha! But seriously, she may not have been yanking your chain... in our new era of 'ready to go foods' we have some serious conveniences and it's possible that what she used to get was not hulled like ours are. Perhaps back in the day they came with the little husks still on them. Or maybe she is pure evil and needs to be b#$%& slapped!

melvira, you can always make me smile She was a baker in Poland at 12 years old (during the war) They had to do everything by hand so this is probly it.....but she has given me recipes and left ingredients out or wrote the wrong way to do it on purpose. So I'm just going to think she was trying to be helpful instead of sinister for my minds sake!

Hey, I did it once... I gave someone a recipe and said 1/4 c. powdered sugar to 2 c. of Crisco when it was supposed to be the other way around. Now I did it totally unintentionally on a concious level, but I wasn't thrilled about giving this person this recipe at the time so I think on a subconcious level I may have done it on purpose. Or maybe it wasn't me... maybe she wrote it down wrong. At any rate... it was funny even though I felt a little bad. You know, mistakes happen! We just laughed it off.

I'm sure Misses McMeany wasn't really screwing with you on purpose. Or was she...

Hopefully not but this is the woman who found a single cheerio under my couch (why was she looking under there in the first place???) and then left it on the counter till my DH and I came back from our Anniversary dinner and lectured me on how this was a choking hazard for my 1 1/2 year old.....she was eating solids at this point...way past cheerios being a choking hazard! My DH tore into her about it too. Like I said I prefer to think that boiling poppyseeds is how she does it, now it's time to go back to my happy place.