recipe: Spiced Pear Cake

This recipe is based on a German/Jewish Apple Cake that my mother used to make around the holidays. She died when I was a kid, and her recipe box was lost in my father's & my resulting move to Florida -- we moved to be closer to my father's mother, who could look after me while my father was at work. When I started getting into baking in college,* I tried to reconstruct the recipe based on shoddy memories of being 6 years old and up to my little elbows in thin-sliced, cinnamon-sugar--coated apples. It never quite came out the way I remembered it, and it wasn't until I was 25 that I thought to ask my family about it -- upon which I received a recipe card in the mail in about a week, hand-written in my grandmother's neat script with the kind of blue ballpoint that she'd always come back with a box of after visiting her State Farm agent.

It'd be lovely for Thanksgiving -- the cake comes out super-dense & moist with a sort of buttery toffee flavor, and the spices are classic fall fare. I modded the recipe to use pears instead of apples 'cause I've got a lot of friends who don't like cooked-apple texture. (The pears are nice, but I still recommend apples -- and the fruit is sliced so thin that it ends up more soft-caramely than pulpy/mushy anyway.) It can be served warm or cool or chilled, with ice cream if you want, or a melted chocolate drizzle maybe, or plain and with coffee.


Spiced Pear Cake

INGREDIENTS

4 medium pears
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
pinch of ground cloves
1/4 cup sugar

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, gently melted (but not hot)
1/2 vanilla bean, scraped (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)

1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt


METHOD

Peel the pears and slice thin (but not VERY thin... maybe 1/8th of an inch. thick enough so they don't fall apart on you). In a bowl, toss the slices gently with the spices and 1/4 cup of sugar and then set aside.

Beat the sugar and eggs together with an electric mixer until the mixture lightens and expands a bit in volume (maybe 2 minutes?). Add the butter and beat for another minute or so, then stir in the vanilla. (You could do all this with a whisk if you needed a workout.)

Sift together the dry ingredients. Stir the dry mixture into the wet mixture (adding it in 2 or 3 batches works well) until the batter is smooth. Grease an 8x8 baking pan (if it's not nonstick) and pour in the batter. A 9-inch round should also work.**

Now is a good time to preheat your oven to 350.

Take the bowl of now-macerated pear slices and discard some of the pear juice/melted sugar that's collecting in it -- you don't want to add too much moisture to the cake. Then, starting about 1/8th of an inch in from the outer edge of pan, lay the pear slices down on top of the batter one at a time, parallel to the sides of the pan, overlapping each slice just a bit. Go around the pan in a ring, and then start a second ring inside the first, overlapping the rings a bit, too. Keep going until you fill the pan or run out of fruit (hopefully the former). This will be a pain in your ass.

When you're done, pop the pan in the oven for ~60 minutes. (If you ended up using a 9x9 pan 'cause you're a naughty baker like me and don't own all that many pans, try ~40 minutes.) When it's done, the cake should be pulling away from the sides of the pan and poking up between the pear slices, which should be golden-caramel-brown, and a toothpick near the center should come out clean. Allow pan to cool at least 15 minutes before serving, but it's even better the next day. Preferably for breakfast.


SUPER-SEEKRIT SHORTCUT & OTHER NOTES

If you wanted to, you could chop the pears into smallish chunks instead of slicing them all fancy, and just kinda scatter the macerated chunks over the batter. But the fancy slices really are pretty.

If you're going to use apples, I like Granny Smith 'cause I'm quaint like that but any tart, firm, baking-approved apple would be okay. Just slice the apples VERY thin if you're doing the fancy slicing thing -- ~1/16th of an inch, or as thin as you can get them consistently and still be able to handle them. And add up to 1/4 cup more sugar during the maceration process, and make sure the mixture sits for at least an hour. Apples are stubborn.

The spices you add to the fruit are a flavor adventure (i.e., spice to taste). I think 1.5 tsp of total spice is a good amount to aim for, though.

* Man I wish I didn't know enough potheads that this sounded less than innocent.

** Baking 911 has a good pan-volume chart for use in emergency substitutions.

I'm in San Francisco for a work convention -- hence the recent Internet silence. What's your favorite thing to do in San Francisco?

I've been once before. Overall, my favorite things include:

1) Touching everything in Kid Robot until someone asks me to either buy something or stop fondling the merchendise.
2) Crepes at Ti Couz (I recommend the scallops and the Nutella, y'know, separately).
3) Discovering that some cities have good mass transit.
4) Eating sashimi at schmancy work receptions at The Palace.
5) Arriving at the Parc 55 to discover that your comp room is a suite that overlooks half the city.
6) Friends who fly up from LA to hang out with you for the weekend.
7) Working 13-hour days I GUESS.
8) Gawking at the fog rolling in while the sun is setting from a suite that overlooks half the city.
9) Gyoza at randomly selected Japanese restaurants on Haight.
10) Anticipating a trip to Dave Eggers' pirate store/writing workshop.

an announcement that smells faintly of salsa

Yes, the rumors are true! Come January 2009, you will have access to the best full-page, M-W-F-updated, black&white-inked webcomic about foodmagic THAT EVER HAS BEEN CREATED.

You have questions. Don't worry, that's perfectly normal.


What's all this about, now?
An ongoing webcomic called Burrito Blade, to debut in January! Each update will be a full page of black-and-white comic book, and will appear at BurritoBlade.com every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

And who’s responsible for this?
Adam P. Knave writes it. Renato Pastor draws it. I poke it with editsticks. D.J. Kirkbride is our spiritual guide and/or inspiration-imp.

But what is it about?
The Legend of the Burrito Blade is an epic fantasy story set in modern-day New York. It's a story about how mythology affects us and how we effect mythology. It's also a story about how we choose sides and what those sides mean. And, you know, it has food-based weaponry and silliness and action and humor and everything else you might fear expect from the likes of us.

How long will the whole story be?
We are people who enjoy getting ahead of ourselves, so right now we're planning for the story to be somewhere between 500 and 600 pages of comic. I believe I mentioned epic? It'll be broken up into ~30-page chapters, which will ultimately be broken up into 3 volumes, for ease of consumption.

How regularly will new comics be posted?
The majority of the time it'll be updated M-W-F, like clockwork, sirs. The plan is to take a week off between chapters (maybe 3-4 times a year) and two weeks off between volumes (once every ~16 months), during which we'll be posting sketches and original fiction and such instead of new pages.

Dare I ask how this idea came about?
Dare on, my copatriot! See, Adam was joking around with D.J., like they often do, and he decided that since D.J. likes burritos and is a ninja that he should have the Burrito Blade. The goofiness grew into an idea in which Adam saw some odd spark of potential, and he decided to use this unsuspecting idea to tell this huge story. Then he asked me to join him, because I edited this similarly wacky book for him and it worked out pretty well. Then Brian Cronin over at Comics Should Be Good offered to run an ad for an artist because he is a great guy. Renato was one of the people who applied, and Adam knew instantly that a deep friendship was written in the stars. They seriously just get along. And thus a team was born. A team!

Does this team have a name?
It does, thanks for asking! We have decided to form AWESOMANCY STUDIOS as an umbrella for our work. We are, by name, AWESOMANCERS. This is Awesomancy Studios’ first project, it will very much not be the last. We all also enjoy doing other jobs, so you shouldn't be shocked if our team grows and changes roles as time marches on (like it does).

Is it true one of the characters is named after Kirkbride?
Yup! D’Jay (who might be the big bad, but you never can quite tell), is named directly after D.J. Kirkbride. (We hate apostrophes in fantasy names too, but you try coming up with an asthetically pleasing phonetic alternative.) Accidentally, he happens to even look like him. Seriously, accidentally. Renato hadn’t seen a picture of Kirkbride when he drew D’Jay.

I'm not really into websites anymore, so can I subscribe to a feed?
You're lucky that we're living in the incredible future. If you happen to be on LiveJournal you can friend burritoblade, and if you use an RSS reader you can add http://burritoblade.com/feed/ to your feeds. There will be (mostly!) silence from now until we go live, of course, but tidbits and trinkets will be going up periodically in the meanwhile.


Any questions?