POP-UP POPPY SEEDS

When I was in my teens, back in 1958, my friend Lanny’s mom surprised us all one day when she offered candies from a special box. “These are chocolate-covered bumblebees…” she said, pointing to the large sweets, “…and these are clusters of chocolate-covered ants.” With those few words she cured my curiosity for anything and everything referred to as “gourmet”.

Fortunately, the cure didn’t last long.

A lifetime later, in 1990, I ran a small bakery from my 420-square-foot West Village apartment. Using a standard kitchen oven and a convection oven, with a microwave as a backup for melting butter and such, I supplied desserts to a half-dozen local restaurants. I was “Sticky-Face Bakery” and one of my most popular cakes was a super-moist lemon-poppy seed bundt cake. It was full of lemon rind, and while it cooled I'd jab it with bamboo skewers, making about a hundred holes into which I poured a half-pint of sugary home-made lemon juice. It was very moist, and weighed about four pounds.

One of my customers was a restaurant on my corner called Nadine’s. Rich, the head chef, featured my pies and cakes, and the lemon-poppy seed cake was one of their favorites. 
But I got bored with the baking routine and knew I would always stay “small business” because of my space limitations, so I announced that the last week of June 1990 would see my final deliveries
The somewhat hasty decision was arrived at also because I was going on a two-month trip to Oregon. So I planned to give myself a few days after my last deliveries to prepare for the trip, and it was a relief to have had schlepped my last stack of cake boxes. 
Only, there had been a… slight snag with my final order for the restaurant on the corner. Nadine’s dessert chef had ordered about a half dozen pies and cakes, two of which were the delicious lemon-poppy seed numbers. And since they “cured” best of all of my desserts, I made them first and placed one of them on my windowsill to cool while it absorbed the lemon flavor. 
In the course of shuttling back and forth in my small apartment, I would glance in its direction—making sure that it stayed sitting securely on the sill, under its aluminum cake-carrier lid. 
And I barely paid heed to that solitary ant weaving along the windowsill. But after four or five hours of busy baking I started to notice several ants. 
Oh-oh. Where there’s a few ants there are hundreds! 
I ran to the window and ripped the cover off and…Part-AY! Brown ants were popping in and out of the hundreds of sweetened skewer holes, singing old ballads and waving bottles of Limoncello! The ones along the rims were already blissfully drowned in a sea of lemony run-off.

Yikes! There was no time to make another one! I couldn’t let Nadine’s down!

So, in a panic I cleaned off the edges and stingered off into outer ant space the occasional drunken wise guy who stood on hind legs and stuck his tongue out at me. But what about the ones in the lemon juice tunnels? I popped the cake into the microwave and set off a hundred-percent zap for three seconds. When I opened the door, partying ants were scattering for the doors. I helped them along. But there were still those hangers on; so I zapped the cake for three seconds once again. This time a few dozen stragglers stumbled out and called for cabs....

When Lanny’s mom offered us those insects in ‘58, it was only a few years after the last of the Imperial Japanese soldiers gave up after holing up in caves on forgotten islands in the Pacific ten years after World War Two had ended. I had ants holding out that were cut from the same mold. 
I zapped the cake again: Two or three wiggled their way free of a few edge holes and toppled off, were swept away by my butter knife. And then a final zap. 
Nothing.... all quiet on the western front.

But had I really won the war? The juice holes were probably full of dead soldiers! And then I remembered Lanny’s mom, and how sweetened ants were a gourmet treat…at least in lands with protein issues…and how diners should be proud (in that dim-lit restaurant) to eat special stuff like a few ants. Why, they look just like…poppy seeds!

A day before I left for the coast I was passing Nadine’s when head chef Rich popped out of a side door and called to me.

Uh-oh.

“Hey, Art,” he said, “did we order two lemon-poppy seed cakes from you?” 
I said Yes, that’s true—and he said, “Well, it was too much. We didn’t need two. No harm and nothing on you, but now we have more than we need.”

“Oh, um, sorry,” I said.

"Anyway—listen, you wanna come in and have a piece with me?”

Now, to my knowledge I have never turned down a piece of cake.

But…

Oregon was fine that time of year. And I made tons of wild blackberry jam…bug-free wild blackberry jam (as far as I know).