Purposeful Cake

I like to think that I have gotten pretty good at finding the right recipe for very specific occasions. It might be a friend’s Christmas tree decorating party. Or it might be All the Pears Are Suddenly Overripe Day, which occurs several times through the fall harvest season. (You say that holiday isn’t on your calendar? Hm. Very strange.) And sometimes these two fall on the same day, like how Hannukah and Christmas overlap this year, or those weird years where Greek Easter and Protestant Easter happen at the same time. Whatever the holiday, this is not a bad idea for a dessert, courtesy of Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite: 150 Recipes and Stories about the Food You Love. (The recipe is also available on the New York Times website, where the author has a regular column.)

Start with a bunch of pears, peel, cored, & quartered. They get browned in an oven-proof skillet in some honey, and then sprinkled with thyme before going into the oven to let them bake a bit and get really soft.

While they are baking, mix up some sugar (this is hippy sugar, hence the color–granulated white is perfectly fine) with some eggs, lemon zest, vanilla extract, and (if you happen to have some) a little pear brandy.

Add flour, a little salt, and a lot of melted butter.

Pour the batter over the baked pears, scatted some chopped almonds on top, and bake again until the cake is set.

It should be noted that a 10-inch skillet (what I have) is really not the same thing as a 9-inch skillet (what the recipe calls for). If your kitchen is similarly equipped, make sure to cut down the final baking time by at least 5 minutes–the cake had a great flavor, but was a little overcooked.

Somehow I don’t have a photo of the cake once we flipped it out of the pan. Hm. So I’ll just say that it helps to have a really well seasoned cast iron skillet, and also another set of hands. The incredibly patient & dextrous hands of your mother, for example. 

Final note: I bet there is a really good gluten-free version of this recipe that uses almond flour instead of wheat flour and cuts out the sliced almonds…

Adaptation

I made this simple summer peach cake from Food52, and it was amazing. Really. You should have been there. Only the seasons have changed now, and instead of an implausibility of peaches, I found myself with a chattering of pears. (There don’t seem to be the same wonderfully odd collective nouns for fruit as there are for animals, so I’m coopting my favorite terms.) I am nothing if not adaptable in the kitchen, and I decided there was no reason I couldn’t make a simple early fall pear cake, with a few small adjustments to the recipe.

Obviously, one needs a bunch of pears (Bartletts here). At least 3, but 4 or 5 would be nice, too.

Keeping the skins on, core & dice the pears, then toss with some sugar & allspice.

Next, take some softened butter and mix it up with sugar. As usual, I’m using palm sugar, which is why this looks so dark. Regular cane sugar would be fine, though. And if you don’t feel like working out your arms quite so much, a hand mixer would probably not be a bad idea in lieu of a wooden spoon and some muscle.

To that, add an egg, some plain yogurt, and a little vanilla extract.

And then a mix of flour, ground almonds, baking powder, and baking soda. If you have almond flour on hand, fantastic. If not, take just under 1/2 cup of whole raw almonds and blitz them in the food processor until they look like a course flour.

Spread the dough into a buttered & floured springform pan. (It will be quite thick, so you WILL need to spread it. It will not just pour.)

Then smoosh all the pears on top of the base. Try to get them more or less evenly distributed. Sprinkle on some coarse sugar for good measure.

Stick the whole thing in a hot oven, and voila!

Simple Fall Pear Cake
Adapted from Food52

4 ripe pears
3/4 teaspoons allspice
1 cup sugar (divided use)
6 tablespoons softened butter
1 large egg
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup finely ground almonds
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Turbinado/Demerara sugar

Preheat the oven to 350F. Flour and butter a 9″ or 10″ round pan (springform is best, but a regular cake pan is fine).
Core and cube the pears. Toss them with the allspice and 2 Tbsp of the sugar.
Beat the rest of the sugar with the softened butter. Mix in the egg, yogurt, and vanilla.
In another bowl, combine the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, and baking soda. Add that into the butter/sugar mixture until just combined.
Spread the dough into the prepared pan, and then pour the fruit on top. Smoosh them into the dough pretty well, then sprinkle a palmful of the coarse sugar over top of everything.
Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 325F and continue baking 45 minutes more, until a cake tester comes out clean.

This would also be good with cardamom instead of allspice. Or if you happen to have some pear brandy, try that instead of vanilla extract and tell me how it goes.

Red, red wine (and pear sorbet)

I have a sister who lives in Durango, Colorado, a town of about 15,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state.  Her street address involves the letters “CR,” which for years I though stood for “country road,” exemplifying the city mouse/country mouse dichotomy of our relationship. It actually stands for “county route,” which isn’t as on the nose, but the point is, she’s in Durango, and I live in a ZIP code so populous that the USPS was compelled to split it in three a few years back. Omnia Uppereastsidia in tres partes divisa est.

Guess which one of us has pear trees growing in her yard?

Just because I don’t have the option of growing my own bounty, though, doesn’t stop me from cooking. That is what CSAs are for, after all.

I will admit, though, that L. has me beat in certain departments, like making jams and preserves. I haven’t explored that particular area of cooking yet (though if I keep getting overloaded with peaches the way I have been, it could be just a matter of time). Back in the days before she had a little munchkin to run after all the time, she made jars and jars of apricot pie filling and pinot noir-pear butter and would give them to her awe-struck and grateful family members for Christmas. (Side note: I used to think that apple butter and pear butter and the like consisted of, well, butter, with mashed fruit mixed in. There’s got to be a market for that, but I’d need a different name for it…)

Wow, this is a long introduction. I need a tangent board on this blog. What I was saying is that she once sent me a jar of pinot noir-pear butter. Which was my inspiration in hunting down a recipe for a red wine-pear sorbet, because sorbet is more my speed. And lo and behold, everyone’s favorite ex-con and professional homemaker Martha Stewart saves the day with a recipe for just that.

Start with some red wine (this is a bottle of cab/sangiovese/merlot blend that I pulled from my smallish stash), a pound of pears (Clapp’s red in this case; I think you want something crisp, rather than something juicy), some sugar, and some lemon juice.

Peel and core the pears, and then cut them into bite-sized chunks.

Pour yourself a cup of wine (no, a CUP, not a glass, though you might as well have a glass, too, since that’s all you’ll need from the bottle) and combine with a cup and a quarter of water, and 3/4 cup sugar in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat until it comes to a boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Add in the pear chunks and reduce the heat.

Let them simmer for 10 minutes, until the pear is pretty soft. Then turn off the heat, mix in the lemon juice and a pinch of salt, and let it cool. Then put it in a bowl, covered, in the fridge, overnight.

Here is where my instructions vary from Ms. Stewart’s.

Next day, pull out your trusty food processor and your trusty ice cream maker. Using a slotted spoon, scoop the pear chunks into the food processor and puree them thoroughly. Pour the pear puree back into the bowl with the wine and mix it all up. Then pour that combination into the ice cream maker and run it for at least a half hour (or however your machine works).

The original recipe notes that, even after you freeze the final product for a few hours, it will remain on the soft side. This is because alcohol never really cooks off entirely, and it does not freeze. So my little taste test was about the texture of Rita’s Water Ice. (Water? Ice? No, I can’t explain. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just click on the damn link.) I imagine that when I go back for another helping, it’ll be more like a traditional sorbet.

Also, final city mouse/country mouse tangent: growing in my sister’s garden are a crop of purple potatoes. Guess where she got the potatoes she needed to start growing them in the first place? I believe the conversation went something like this: “Lex, I want purple potatoes and nobody sells them here. Not even the natural foods store.” “Wow, really? What a shame. The Italian market up the street always has them.”

A few dollars of potatoes and a few dollars of postage later, and now she’s got a corner on the purple potato market.

Also, I’m now imagining a scoop of this sorbet paired with a scoop of blue cheese ice cream…