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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Honey Vanilla Pear Cake


Have you ever bought pears from the grocery store? Then you’ll understand how you can completely forget about them ripening forever on your counter until suddenly they need to be used right now. Well using smitten kitchen's nectarine brown butter buckle as a starting point and with modifications from The Flavor Bible I ended up with this cake,
delicious, sort of ugly and not really resembling the starting point as much as I had intended (substituting honey for sugar doesn’t work to make a streusel topping! should have thought that one through!). Whatever the not streusel topping really is, it was delicious and this ended up a delightfully rich cake.

Makes 8-10 servings
Ingredients:
Cake:
  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • ½ cup whole wheat flour
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • ¾ tsp. salt
  • 1 tsp ground ginger (you may want to double this if you want the flavor to come through it ended up a light undertone)
  • ½ cup softened unsalted butter
  • 1 cup honey (used a mix of cheap clover and expensive wildflower honey)
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2/3 cup milk (I used nonfat anything will work)
  • 2 Tbsp. vanilla extract
  • 1 tbsp lemon juice
  • 2 ripe pears cut into wedges
Not Streusel Topping
  • ¼ cup softened butter
  • ½ cup honey (or sugar if you want real streusel)
  • ½ cup all purpose flour
  • ½ tsp ginger
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • Pinch of salt

Instructions
    1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease 9 inch round cake pan.
    2. Blend flour, salt, baking powder and ginger in a medium bowl.
    3. Combine butter, honey and eggs in large bowl, add milk.
    4. Add dry ingredients to wet mix until just combined spread in your prepared pan.
    5. Toss wedges of pear in the lemon juice, arrange in single layer on the cake, you probably don’t need to worry about how artistic it looks as they seem to have sunk to the middle/bottom of the cake because of the wet batter.
    6. Make topping in a medium to small bowl, sprinkle or spread on top of your cake and bake for 40-50 min.
    7. Let cool and enjoy!

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