Delicious Pear Hazelnut Cake: spelt flour
A delicious and easy-to-make pear hazelnut cake made with spelt flour. A fabulous moist texture with fruity goodness, paring well with added dark chocolate chunks and a hint of cardamom. I made this recently for my husband's birthday as he requested a cake with fruit. I chose new season autumnal pears. I stumbled across a BBC good food recipe and tweaked it to have ingredients I use like white spelt flour instead of self-raising flour. I couldn't buy golden castor sugar here so I added white sugar and a little brown sugar, for a Swedish touch I added a cardamom, but this is optional. Originally I toasted and ground the hazelnuts, but in future and in the video tutorial I added in already ground hazelnuts, and I will buy ground hazelnuts for ease.
Takes = 15 minutes
Makes = 8 generous slices
Bakes = 55-60 minutes
Ingredients
- Ground hazlenuts – 100g (just under 1 cup)
- White spelt flour, or your choice – 140g (about 1 cup)
- Baking powder – 2 teaspoon
- Ground cardamom – 1 teaspoon
- Unsalted butter, softened – 175g (3/4 cup)
- White sugar – 100g (1/2 cup)
- Brown sugar – 40g (about 3 heaped tbs)
- Large eggs – 2
- Pears – 2 peeled, cored and chopped
- Pears – 1 peeled, cored and sliced for the top
- Dark chocolate, chopped – 50g (1/2 cup)
- Apricot jam or similar, warm (for glaze) – 2 tablespoon
Method
- Preheat oven to 160˚C fan and grease a 23 cm (9 inches) spring form cake tin and add baking paper to the base only.
- Grind hazelnuts or if you have prepared ground hazelnuts add in the flour and butter and mix until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Then add in the beaten eggs, and sugars. Peel, core and chop 2 pears and fold in. Chop the chocolate into chunks then fold through.
- Add the batter to your cake tin. Then peel, core and slice 1 pear and press into the top.
- Bake in the middle shelf for 50-60 minutes. Remove and glaze the top with warm jam. A light colour like apricot jam works better. Cool slightly before serving. We enjoy this with vanilla ice cream.
