This is a lovely moist cake, as it has chopped pears cooked in the cake mixture. Serving the cake with poached pears and the sticky syrup they have been cooked in also adds to the lusciousness of this dessert cake!
The recipe I have created, like many good recipes, is a “hybrid”, based on one I found in a Delicious Magazine, with some tweaks from Gourmet Traveller. The following recipe is the result of “tailoring” the recipes to suit what I was after in a delicious pear cake.
Ingredients
250g butter, softened
250g marzipan, softened
315g caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 free range eggs
150g self-raising flour
100g ground almonds
2 ripe pears, chopped, + 3 whole pears for poaching
Method
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C. Grease and line the base and sides of a 23cm springform cake pan with baking paper.
Place the butter, marzipan and 150g sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer.
Beat for 3-4 minutes on medium speed until creamy. Add almond and vanilla extracts, then add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Fold in the flour and ground almonds. Gently fold through chopped pears and then spoon into the lined cake tin.
Bake for 40-45 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
To poach pears, place remaining 165 sugar in a saucepan over a low heat with 750ml water, stirring until sugar dissolves. Add the pears, and poach for 15 minutes or until tender. Remove the pears and set aside to cool. Increase the heat to medium, and cook the poaching liquid for 10-15 minutes or until reduced and syrupy. Set aside to cool.
To serve, place the poached pears on the top of the cake and drizzle the pear syrup over the top. Lovely with lashings of whipped cream, or ice cream or Greek yogurt!
The Quirk and the Cool 