Chocolate pear cake

Perhaps not the most attractive photograph, but certainly a delicious cake. I had a desire for a basic chocolate cake, but also wanted to use some of the seasonal fruit around at the moment and pears and chocolate seemed like a good combination. Based on a recipe in 'Mix', a compilation cookbook from the Australian Women's Weekly (a recent payday cookbook purchase....) I had bookmarked this one a while ago to try. It didn't disappoint and I will be making it again.

The recipe is for a plain chocolate cake with a chocolate icing and I decided to peel and thinly slice a large-ish pear and place it on the top of the mixture before baking, in the (rough) shape of spokes of a wheel. I had sort of hoped that the pear would stay on the top, but it largely didn't, sinking mostly without trace into the mixture as it cooked - you can see a piece of sunken pear in the picture at the top. One piece did stay up though, and with hindsight it's perhaps best that most of the pear sank because the piece remaining started to discolour quite quickly - a cake best eaten on the day of making.

The cake has quite a high proportion of sugar, but doesn't taste too sweet, instead it seems to have a moist dense but not heavy crumb, sort of tending towards brownie. Delicious in other words! The pear worked well with the chocolate, and there's something about the grainy texture of cooked pear that I really like - it's a similar texture to tinned pear, which I also like!

Chocolate pear cake
Ingredients
1 medium to large pear, peeled and thinly sliced (I used quite a ripe conference pear for this)
125g butter, softened
1tsp vanilla extract
275g caster sugar
2 eggs
150g self-raising flour
50g semolina (the original recipe said 200g self raising flour)
50g cocoa powder
160ml water

Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line a deep 20cm/8" round cake tin and line with baking parchment.
- Beat butter, extract and sugar together until well combined. Add eggs, sifted flour, semolina and cocoa and the water and mix on a low speed until combined. Increase the speed of your mixer and beat about 3 minutes until the mixture is smooth and paler in colour.
- Spread mixture into cake tin. Arrange the pear around the cake in a spoke design. Bake for about 1 hour, although mine took about 1 hour 10-15 mins.
- Remove from oven and cool on wire rack.

This would make a really delicious warm dessert with some vanilla icecream, but was equally as good cold with a cup of tea.

Buttermilk raisin cake revisited

Oh, this is just such a delicious cake that even though I've already posted about it once here, I want to sing its praises all over again. Last time I made it, I can't say the experience was a total success, but the flavour was so amazing that I needed to attempt it again and seeing the last piece in the freezer from last year (what can I say - my freezer is full enough that I could lose anything in there!!!) was all the prompt I needed to dig out the recipe.

The recipe was originally from the Caked Crusader, and I haven't really made any changes to the proportions of the cake, just to the overall size. As mentioned last time, the cake took far longer to cook than I expected, resulting in an overcooked edge. To recify this I decided to keep the tin size the same but to make 2/3 of the recipe. This worked admirably, and the cake cooked in around an hour at the same temperature. Perfect. I was really pleased with the texture of the crumb and the edge wasn't too thick or dark this time. I served it au naturel, but if you want to gild the lily, I suggest you hop over to the Caked Crusaders blog for her custard buttercream recipe to serve with it, which sounds rather divine!

I can't explain the flavour of this cake well enough to do it justice, but it's sweet yet not too sweet and the raisins and buttermilk combine beautifully - the sum is so much greater than the parts and I urge you to try it even if you're not the world's greatest raisin fan.

I used the following quantities this time round, but followed the same method as last time, found on the Caked Crusader's blog.

Buttermilk raisin cake170g butter, softened; 170g caster sugar; 2 eggs; 1 tsp vanilla extract; 200g raisins; 250g plain flour; 1 tsp baking powder; 115ml buttermilk. You will need an 8" square cake tin, greased and lined with baking parchment.

A different Parkin for Bonfire night

Yep, it's that time of year again, and although I'm a couple of days late, I'm going to post this anyway. I wrote about making Parkin last year, so you can read that post for some more of my thoughts on this rather delicious treat. This year, I decided to try a different recipe, just for a change, and to see if I could lose the rather burnt looking top from the other recipe (I'll just reiterate that although it always looks burnt, it never seems to taste it). I debated making the other recipe but only doing 2/3 so that it cooked more quickly, but was browsing through the forums over on Dan Lepard's website (bet you never saw that one coming did you!) and found his recipe for 100 year old parkin. Well, it'd be 102 year old parkin now, but what's two years among friends?!?

Anyway, the recipe is here and as I stuck to it pretty closely I'll not reproduce it, but will leave you to find it yourselves! The only changes I made were to use salted butter and omit the salt, use 100ml milk (rather than 50ml, a change suggested by Dan later in the thread) and to substitute crystallised stem ginger for the mixed peel. I quite like mixed peel if it's the stuff you cut up yourself, but I wanted to go with the overall gingeriness (is that a word?) of the parkin.

I was really pleased with how this turned out - it's delicious. Nubbly and oaty and gingery and biting into a piece of crystallised stem ginger is particularly good - I might add more next time. You really do want to leave this to mature after you've made it. I left mine wrapped up for 5 days before cutting it, and it continued to improve for a few days after that, getting stickier on top (and then it was all gone....). I hate to say it, but I think J's recipe from the Cordon Bleu cookery course may have been ousted in favour of this one. Thanks Dan.

And you can see that the top isn't burnt either - woo-hoo!!! Success all round. Colleagues were really pleased when this arrived at work - ooooh, Parkin!

Oven dried tomato and basil rolls

These rolls are what happened to the rest of the dough that I used to make the bread bowls and foccacia here. You can find the recipe in that post, so I'll just outline how I made these here.

I had some cherry tomatoes in the fridge crying out to be used up, so I decided to roast them with a little dried thyme and a drizzle of olive oil. I used a 250g punnet of tomatoes, halved them and roasted fairly slowly, probably on a medium heat (although I can't quite remember, about Gas 4 ish) for a while (oh, this is so precise isn't it!!!) until they looked shrivelled but not cremated. Probably around an hour, but start checking earlier and keep checking. I had other things in the oven at the same time, so I'm not sure exactly how long they took. Remove and allow to cool.

When the dough was ready for shaping, I patted it out into a rectangle, and spread the roasted tomatoes (I probably used about half of the punnet) over the dough, and add a liberal amount of fresh basil. Roll into a sausage and cut 6 slices. I then pinched one side of the slices together to stop the tomatoes escaping from inside, and turned the rolls onto that sealed side, so that the open side faced upwards, see below.

I allowed the rolls to prove for around 40 minutes (I think, again these were a side line to various other things going in and out of the oven) and then baked at 200C/Gas 6 for around 30 minutes - again check to make sure they're not burning.

They were delicious - the sweet tartness of the tomato worked really well with the silky soft, smooth olive oil enriched dough, which was moist and very more-ish. I was really pleased with the way these looked and would definitely make them again. Really good with any Italian meal requiring a bread roll, or with soup for winter lunchtimes. Perfect when there's frost on the ground and a nip in the air.

Milk Chocolate and Orange Cookies - Sweet and Simple Bakes

Happy November everyone! Where exactly has this year gone? - I can't believe it's November already and time for the next installment of Sweet and Simple Bakes! Maria has chosen a cookie recipe for us this month, and I have to admit to being a little unsure about cookies. Cakes, yes, cookies, hmmm, maybe. It's not that I don't like eating them, more that I'm just not very good at making them. I have a tendency to over-bake them and they come out too crispy and not as soft as I'm hoping for. Perhaps the cure for this is just to bake lots and lots of cookies! Doesn't seem such an onerous task does it! So let's start with the Sweet and Simple recipe. You can find the recipe here, at the Sweet and Simple recipe blog and be sure to check out the round up, published tomorrow at the Sweet and Simple bakes blog, here.

As with all of the sweet and simple recipes these were easy to put together, once I'd remembered to leave the butter out of the fridge to soften (difficult when my kitchen is so cold that the butter stays hard anyway!). I decided to use milk chocolate, as I sometimes find white chocolate too sweet and I thought milk chocolate would go well with the orange flavour. My absolute preference would have been dark chocolate (70% or so) but I know this isn't that popular at work and didn't want to have to eat the whole batch myself! These really spread a lot during baking, so be sure to leave adequate room between them for expansion. If you don't you'll end up with one ginormous cookie, as shown below.....oops!!!

Cookie sheet!!!

Luckily I was baking in two batches, so managed to get some normal shaped cookies too! So what were they like? Well, they seemed to go pretty well at work, and were very nice. But I feel that I did succumb to my old weakness of cooking them for too long as they were mostly crunch with very little chew. This is a perfectly nice recipe, but my quest for the perfect cookie has just begun. Stay tuned.......

Perfect cookie!

Fresh from the oven - Edible bread bowls and focaccia

A while ago, Jules over at Domestic Goddess in Training mentioned that the baking group she is part of were looking for new members. I have started to really enjoy making my own bread, as followers of this blog will realise by now! but I wanted something to push me out of my comfort zone (T take note!) and joining a baking group seemed like a good way to do it so I jumped at the chance! I am now a member of Fresh from the Oven.

My first challenge was hosted by Corry of Bake It Off and was to make edible bread bowls, based on a recipe by Richard Bertinet and published in his book 'Dough'. I actually have this book, and have opened it and admired the lovely photography and creative ideas many times but had only baked once from it (a plain white loaf if I recall correctly), so I was really pleased to get another chance using a different recipe. Edible bread bowls sound like a nice idea, but I wasn't honestly sure how well I could get them to work, and my fears were well founded. The dough came together well, and was easy to work. I have a confession to make though, I'm afraid that I have tried Richard Bertinet's method of working dough in the past and found it messy with the dough being sticky and difficult to work, and I didn't find that the dough became smooth and pliable, remaining obstinately sticky when I tried in spite of watching the very helpful DVD that came with the book (and can be found here online - he is making a sweet dough in the video, but the technique is applicable to all dough) so I defaulted to my chosen Dan Lepard technique for the dough, which worked perfectly.

I had difficulty in shaping the dough around the bowls and found that the edge ended up significantly thicker than the base, which is annoying if you're planning to pour soup into it - the base needs to be strong and thick, not thin and weak! I think that resting the dough for a little after knocking the air out of it might help for the future. So my bowls were never graced with soup, I have to admit that I broke them up and used them as chunky croutons, which worked really well! The other problem I encountered was that the insides of the bowl were very pale in comparison to the exterior, as you can see by comparing the photos above and below. I'm not really sure how to recify this though.

I'm sure other people will have made much more successful attempts at this great idea than me though, so check out the round up over at the Fresh From The Oven blog for better pictures and more inspiration.



However, one of the benefits of owning this lovely book was that I could look at the original recipe. The book is divided into four main sections, covering four doughs - white, olive (used for this challenge), brown and rye. At the start of each section is an inspiring double page photographic spread of all the breads Bertinet will show you how to make with that particular dough. In the olive dough section are tempting delights such as pizza, pancetta and mixed olive bread and ciabatta, along with one of my favourites, rock salt and rosemary focaccia. How could I resist using some of my dough to make one of these lovely breads? Well, I couldn't and it was much more successful than the bread bowls!


I used dried rosemary I as find fresh tends to burn, and I thouroughly enjoyed this focaccia. The texture of the dough was superb - moist and tender and just slightly chewy, just the way I like my focaccia. A perfect accompaniment to a risotto or a lovely bowl of soup - enjoy!

Stone fruit yogurt cake

You will note that the title of this post is in fact not quite true.... raspberries obviously not being a stone fruit! However, the premise of Dan Lepard's recipe is to use up nectarines, plums or peaches past their best. I had the nectarines but I also had raspberries which were threatening to go off if I didn't use them up quickly. Hence the combination of raspberry and nectarine here. I feel that it's following the spirit of the recipe so hopefully Dan won't mind this variation! I also had the necessary Greek yogurt for this recipe languishing in the fridge, so when this recipe was published at the end of September (find the original article here on the Guardian website), it pushed it's way past everything else on the 'to bake' list and ended up at the top. And I'm so glad that it did! This is a stunner, both visually and in terms of taste. I love the way the fruit is on the top of the cake when you flip it over all juicy and inviting.

It's a little while since I made it, but from what I remember, I followed the recipe pretty closely. I omitted the lemon zest as I wanted the flavour of the fruit to come through (and I didn't have three lemons, and even if I had had the lemons I was in a lazy mood that didn't run to zesting three lemons..... sorry!). I used two or three nectarines (rubbish memory) and about 100g raspberries - the amount of fruit just covered the base of the tin, which seemed right to me. I also used demerara sugar to sprinkle over the fruit rather than caster, just because I seem to have an excess of demerara sugar at the moment.

I wondered about Dan's instruction to line the tin with foil, and just lined mine with baking parchement as usual. I understood the instruction once the cake was cooked and some of the caramelly syrup formed by the fruit juice and sugar had escaped onto the bottom of my oven..... ah well, it was only a little escape and didn't affect the cake!

The cake had a beautiful gentle peak when it was cooked, which was fine, but when it came to turning the cake onto a cooling rack, the peak meant that the base of the cake started to come apart. I quickly transferred the cake to my cupped hand and struggled to get the lipped plate you see in the pictures out of the cupboard one-handed to hold the cake and prevent the base cracking open. Luckily I succeeded (no mean feat when you're holding hot cake in one hand and attempting to wrestle a plate from the bottom of a heavy pile of plates!) and the cake didn't crack or break.

I was really pleased with the way this cake turned out - a perfect peach melba cake! The yogurt in the mixture added a beautiful smooth richness to the cake, without being over-rich as I have occasionally found soured cream to be and I will certainly be making this cake again. In fact, there's more yogurt in the fridge this very moment. I think this would be perfect with some chopped fresh peach or nectarine and either a spoonful of the greek yogurt or a little drizzle of cream.

Cinnamon-Pecan Coffee Cake

I have been admiring the rather delicious looking cakes being baked by the Cake Slice Bakers group over the past twelve months and sort of wishing that I could join in, but at the same time being thankful that I didn't need to buy a third cake tin for the third layer that many of the cakes made by the group required. The book last year was Sky High Irresistible Layer Cakes. (Or indeed, transporting the resulting delicious confection to work - nigh on impossible on a bus!) However, when Katie over at Apple and Spice (you really have to check out her blog - her cakes are amazing and really inspired me to want to join this group!) mentioned that the group was opening up the membership to new members a while ago, I decided that it was now or never and in I jumped!

The book that the group is baking from this year is 'Southern Cakes - sweet and irresistible recipes for everyday celebrations' by Nancie McDermott. This is the South of the USA, not the south coast of the UK! so a note for UK (and other non-US) readers is in order about this month's recipe - coffee cake in the USA doesn't necessarily contain coffee in any way, shape or form, but is merely used to identify a cake which is consumed with coffee. Confusing no? So I haven't left out any ingredients from this recipe......

So my first recipe as a Cake Slice Baker was unfortunately one I can't actually eat unless I sub a fairly key ingredient. I therefore present Cinnamon-Cashew Coffee Cake! I really wanted to give this cake a taste and pecans and me don't mix, but luckily I can still eat cashews, so I could still get the crunchy texture the recipe is asking for. This cake was very easy to put together, which is good news as I'd left making it until the last moment through disorganisation. I decided, along with quite a few other members of the group, to make a half recipe, and baked mine for the same length of time in a 6.5x9.5" baking tin, which worked perfectly well.

I amended some of the quantities slightly - cutting down a little on the cinnamon as I'm not the world's greatest fan of cinnamon and I also converted the recipe from cups to grams. I've therefore given the recipe below so that readers who prefer metric measurements don't have to convert their own. I couldn't find a conversion for a cup of nuts though, so I guesstimated and serendipidously had about 100g nuts left in the packet, which seemed about right. I also replaced the specified all-purpose flour and baking powder with self raising flour because I prefer to use this.

Cinnamon-Raisin filling

150g light muscovado sugar

1 1/2 tbsp plain flour

1 scant tbsp cinnamon (original recipe states 3 tbsp for the full recipe, these quantities are for half)

110g raisins

100g cashews (or pecans if you can have them!), coarsley chopped

85g butter, melted

Coffee cake (without any coffee...... can you tell how much this confuses me!!!)

220g self raising flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

120ml milk (I used semi-skimmed)

110g butter, softened

100g caster sugar

1 egg

I didn't read the instructions properly and combined all of my filling ingredients together, which I wasn't supposed to do, but I can't see that it would have made much difference. Like many others, I found the batter very sticky indeed, and it was difficult to spread around the tin, but as in my recent plum oat slice, using slightly under half of the mixture for the first layer was a good move and made spreading the remaining layer over the top a little easier. Because there were two raisin/nut layers it didn't really matter if the top layer didn't quite reach the edges in some places.

So how did it taste? Well, it disappeared in record time at work, so there must be something right about it! It smelled lovely whilst it was baking, filling the house with a warming cinnamon-y scent, just right for the autumn weather we've been having round here. The cinnamon flavour was quite strong and the texture of the cake was lovely and soft, a great contrast to the crunchy, chewy nutty raisin layer. The nuts weren't as crunchy as I was expecting, but then I've never had a cake with nuts in it before so I'm not sure if it's normal for the nuts to be quite soft rather than crispy. I suppose that might just be a feature of cashews and that pecans might be crunchier - who knows!!! I really enjoyed the cake though - it was lovely to hit a little pocket of sweet sugar - and there were plenty of them dotted throughout the cake.

Thanks for a great first recipe - I've looked through the book and am really looking forward to making more from it over the next year! Don't forget to check out the other Cake Slice Bakers posts here at the blogroll.