RECIPE

ANJOU PEAR CAKE RECIPE

In search for a "refreshing" cake/tarte involving pears, I like to researching recipes, then take the bits I like from each to combine it to a new version that I like better.

This is based on a recipe on BBC Good Food which I was drawn to because it is more pear than cake. I thought that the name Anjou Pear Cake would be a pear cake from the town of Anjou in France, but maybe it just refers to the type of pear?

The image left has been taken from the recipe webpage.

As you can see it looks more like a tarte but with the consistency of a cake.

Ingredients
50 g melted butter plus some for the tin
500g ripe soft pears - peeled, cored and roughly chopped (see note 1 below)
juice of a lemon
2 eggs (see note 2)
75g self raising flour (see note 3 below)
75g castor sugar
1heap tsp baking powder
1 tsp Poire Williams or other similar spirits (see note 4 below)
smooth apricot jam
icing sugar
pinch of salt

Method
Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Line a 20cm loose-bottomed cake tin with baking parchment and brush with butter.

Put the prepared pears in a bowl with the lemon juice and Poire William, if using, to prevent them discolouring. Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl, adding a pinch of salt.

Beat in the eggs and melted butter till fluffy and then add the caster sugar and continue to beat in.

Fold in the pears with their juices and then fold in the flour mixture.

Pour the cake mixture into the tin.

Bake for about 50 mins or until a skewer comes out clean. Place on a wire rack and allow to cool slightly before removing from the tin, gently peeling away the parchment.

note 1
If your pears are hard (especially out of season), you will need to poach the pears in a simple sugar & water syrup method. I normally use conference pears. This will also mean you can skip the lemon juice as the pears will not discolour from the poaching.

By poaching, the resulting pears having more water/syrup and will also be more sweet. So there will be adjustment to the quantity of flour added, see note 3. You need to keep the same quantity of sugar in the recipe and not to reduce this.

note 2
you can also separate the eggs and beat the egg yolk with the butter and sugar first, leaving the beaten egg whites to be folded in later.

note 3
In general, when you fold the flour in, check for the consistency of the mixture. So far I have always had to add extra flour to ensure that the cake is not too wet.

note 4
I normally use an appropriate schnapps, and feel that this enhances the cake. The addition of the schnapps is not about the alcohol, but to give the extra pear punch taste.

ANJOU PEAR CAKE RECIPE

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