Hello Friends!!!  For today’s twenty years ago post, I am cooking from the November 2002 issue  of Super Food Ideas. Let’s see if the mag lives up to it’s name! Today’s theme is picnic food.  These orange and poppyseed cupcakes would be perfect for a spring picnic and were delicious to boot!  Sadly our weather has not been kind.   It has been very cold and rainy so my picnic ended being on my dining room table!

My Picnic Menu

Chicken Club Sandwich

I love a club sandwich but for some reason, I only ever eat them when ordering  from a hotel room service menu.  This one was ok.  No bacon which was disappointing but the addition of avocado was nice.  There was a weird instruction to add tomato sauce (ketchup) into the avocado mix.  I ignored it. because….ewww.  You can do beter November 2002!

Here’s the recipe.

I am not going to talk about the Mac and Cheese  bites here because, I ended up changing the recipe so much that I am going to do them as a separate post! But we came here for Orange and Poppyseed Cupcakes so here they are!

I don’t think I have tasted orange and poppyseed anything before.  There was a time when I was absolutely addicted to the lemon and poppyseed muffins at Muffin Break.   It got so all the people I worked with  knew how much I loved them so even if I had not gone past the Muffin Break that morning, my colleagues would let me know if the lemon and poppysed muffins were on the menu.  These cupcakes were very reminiscent of those muffins.   In fact though, I did not have enough orange zest  to top all the cupcakes (possibly because I spilt so much of it all over the recipe) so there is a mix of lemon and orange zest on all of them making them even more nostalgic for me.

Orange and Poppyseed Cupcakes – The Recipe

The original recipe was for one large cake.  For  cupcakes, just drop the cooking time,  Mine were ready in 25 minutes.

My Nigella Moment

What is a Nigella moment?  You know how at the end of each episode of a Nigella tv show, you see her popping back to the fridge for just one more bite of something?  My Nigella moment this month is a recipe I cooked from the mag that did not fit with the picnic theme.  It was a salmon fillet with wasabi mayo.  I served mine with some edamame sprinkled with furikake, pickled ginger and some not very Japanese but very delicious oven fries!  In the interest of brevity, I have not included the recipe but, if you like the sound of it and want to do your own trip back in time, hit me up in the comments!

I hope you’ve enjoyed time travelling back to November 2002 with me.

Have a great week!