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!