Sorting out a corner of my office, I found a box file of old recipes. I remembered baking this cake, making notes and changes. Its origins are Hungarian and, as George Lang writes in The Cuisine of Hungary, poppy seeds are ‘the Hungarian housewife’s common ingredient’. Never much used in English cooking, it seemed appropriate to make this cake on the day we left the EU.

The slate-blue poppy seeds used in cooking come from the opium poppy, papaver somniferum, and may contain just an infinitesimal trace of the drug. Corn poppy seeds can be used in their place but lack flavour.

For the cake:

50g poppy seeds
60ml milk
185g butter, diced
1 tbsp grated orange peel
220g caster sugar
3 eggs
225g self-raising flour
75g plain flour
60g ground almonds
125ml orange juice

For the syrup:

220g caster sugar
150ml orange juice
50ml water

Oven at 180°C. A 21cm cake tin, greased and dusted with flour.

In a pan on a low heat, melt the butter in the milk. Put to one side.

Using a large basin mix together the flours, sugar, poppy seeds, ground almond and grated orange peel. Beat the eggs and add these to the dry ingredients and then add the orange juice, milk and butter. Mix rigorously.

Pour the cake mixture into the tin and bake for about 45 minutes or until the cake feels firm.

While the cake is cooking, make the syrup by heating all the ingredients together to boiling point and then reducing the heat to let simmer for 15 minutes before leaving to cool.

When the cake is cooked, take it out of the oven and wait for 10 minutes before removing it from its tin, placing it on a cake rack with a tray underneath and pouring over the cooled syrup.