I like pears raw, but I like them cooked too, so having bought a few too many I set about making them into a delicious cake to share with my colleagues. Pears and chocolate are always a good combination so chocolate was my next ingredient of choice for the cake and light muscovado sugar to add that depth of flavour that complements chocolate so well.
You can see the gorgeous chunks of soft pear in the cake and you could even kid yourself it was part of your five a day! (Disclaimer - it isn't ;-))
Chocolate Pear Crumble Cake
Ingredients
140g butter, softened
140g light muscovado sugar
210g self raising flour
15g cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 medium conference pears (mine weighed 260g total, before peeling), peeled, quartered and cored
For the crumble
45g plain flour
10g cocoa powder
40g butter
35g demerara sugar
Method
- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm tin. I used a premade parchment paper liner and used my springform tin.
- For the crumble, melt the butter and then add the flour, cocoa powder and sugar. It should form a stiffish paste rather than a dry crumble.
- Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the flour, cocoa powder and eggs and continue mixing until well combined.
- Chop the peeled pears into the mixing bowl (my pieces were about 3/4cm big) and fold them in by hand. It's quite a stiff mixture.
- Spoon into the prepared tin and level as best you can.
- Crumble over the crumble mixture - just break little chunks of the mixture onto the top of the cake.
- Bake in the preheated oven for around 45 minutes (although I confess I can't remember exactly how long mine took) until a cake tester comes out clean.
- Allow to cool, or alternatively serve warm with ice cream, cream or custard for dessert.
Love the texture of cooked pear - slightly grainy and it didn't disappear into the background of the cake. The soft moist pear and cake are complemented well by the slightly crunchy crumble topping, it was a thoroughly enjoyable cake to make and eat. One of my colleagues said this was her favourite cake yet - high praise indeed!
8 comments:
ooh this looks delicious! I don't eat or bake pears very often but I should especially when it looks this good! :)
Lovely! I think pears are one of the best fresh fruits to pair with chocolate.
Ooh pears and chocolate! My fave combo. I love the grainy texture of cooked pears. This is so utterly the cake for me!
This looks gorgeous, I've only started to like pears in the past year or so but there's no arguing they go great with chocolate!
I love chocolate and pears together! Looks great!
This looks like my idea of heaven - chocolate and pear is one of my fave combos. Oddly, I don't like pears raw, but in baked goods - yum yum!
I love my pears raw but this cake sounds interesting - I think I have come across to cooked pears more as I have aged
Ros - thank you! Pears are good cooked.
Suelle - they do make a good pairing don't they.
Dom - you'd love this cake - grainy pears a-plenty here!
Hungryhinny - better late than never - there are loads of things I ought to try and like more!
Lottie - thank you.
CC - I like pears both ways, but can understand you not liking them raw.
Johanna - I guess our tastes change with time!
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