This week's cake is a Pear and Almond Cream Cake that has connections to Sweden.
I love the combination of fruit and almonds and before I started on this journey to cake baking along with the Heavenly Cake Bakers, I often made upside-down cakes. Plum upside-down cake, Pear and chocolate upside-down cake, pineapple upside-down cake - all delicious. The usual technique is to put the fruit is a syrup of some sort, often brown sugar syrup, and place it in the bottom of the pan, then the batter goes on top and after baking, you turn the cake upside-down to serve. But in this case, we are doing something quite different.
Before I describe the cake construction, I'll tell you a bit about the almond cream. This is made with an almond paste, which is processed with caster sugar, to which butter, eggs and vanilla are added. It made quite a creamy consistency and tasted beautiful. In preparation for making the cake there was a bit of discussion around whether to make or purchase almond paste. I read that some of the original bakers had used marzipan and so when I couldn't find anything called almond paste in the local delicatessens I purchased the marzipan. I see though why some bakers suggested making it. It's quite expensive and you only need a small amount and I did sort of stress maybe I wouldn't use it again and it would dry out and be a bit fat waste....but..the cake was so outstandingly delicious, I'll be surprised if my family doesn't tie me to the kitchen and make me produce it again.
Again, though, with the new techniques. Rose has you mixing the flour and butter together, not the butter and sugar - very interesting. My butter, eggs, and sour cream were all at room temperature but the butter was still fairly stiff. My room temperature, as mentioned last week, is about 19.5C, so a bit colder than Rose recommends. I'm not sure what I could do to compensate for this?? I ended up with quite a stiff batter. Perhaps I should have mixed it for longer? Perhaps I should have pre-mixed the butter before adding it to the flour? Things to think about for next time.
After you place the batter in the bundt tin (newly purchased and squeeky shiny) you make a little channel in the top of the batter where the almond cream is placed. The idea is that you don't want the almond cream touching the sides of the cake tin. Then on top of that you place the sliced pears. The pears and almond cream are then to sink down through the batter and end up at the top of the cake. Nifty, huh?
At the 50 minute mark, I pulled the cake out because it was passing all the cooked tests - looked cooked, bounced back, toothpick came out clean. In fact, it looked a bit too brown for my liking. My oven cooks very unevenly and I had rotated the pan during cooking but still one side looked a bit browner than the other. We'll be replacing the oven in the next month or so, and I'm really looking forward to that event!! Unfortunately though, it looks like not all the pears have made the journey from the top to the bottom (which is really the top - what a paradoxical cake).
Then to make matters worst, despite cooling for 10 mins and jiggling as described in the instructions, clearly I'd missed some other vital step and low and behold I left large chunks of the cake in the tin. Sigh. You can see that while lots of pears have made their way, not all have completed the journey. The cake smelled so fantastically appealing though and my attentive family were circling around the kitchen. We each had a piece and they raved about this cake. Then I wandered off to upload photos and begin the blog post. When I returned, 3/4 of the cake was eaten. I guess they'd be happy if I made this cake again. And, I kind of think I need to, given it didn't work perfectly and yet it has for others in the group, and it so clearly a cake that you'd like to make over and over.
