Week17: Apple Pear Cake

The past two weeks have been chocolate based items, so it was time for something fruity. Fruit based desserts have to be really special for me to hold them to the same level as chocolate or peanut butter. I started looking at cake recipes, and apple cakes started to speak to me. I decided I would find the moistest apple cake recipe I could find, but round out the flavor with extras gathered from all the various recipes I looked at. 

The fruits I'm using. Not just apples, but a pear, an orange, sultanas (raisins made from green grapes, not purple like normal raisins), and walnuts, which are not a fruit but they belong in this group more than the flour/sugar items. :-)

First I shaved the poor orange bald and put all the zest in with the sugar.

I mixed them together till the sugar was infused with the orange. It smelled heavenly and in the final cake it infused a delicious light citrus flavor.

The dry ingredients before mixing; the orange infused sugar, flour, salt, baking soda and powder, cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger.

Once mixed together though, it looked mostly like flour.

The liquids. Buttermilk, sour cream, and oil. This is where the moistness and richness of the cake comes from. I love butter, but when you want a light and fluffy cake, oil is the fat to use. The sour cream and buttermilk add a nice dense moistness to keep the cake from being too empty of substance.

The wet added to the dry.

Eggs so it will set.

The original recipe called only for apples, but I wanted a more nuanced flavor, so I also used a bit of Pear, and doubled the fruit amount.

Two full cups of fruit in each cake.

The apples added to the batter.

Sultanas and raisins can bake dry in the oven if you don't soak them in hot water first, so I'm doing that here, with a few drops of rum extract.

Sultanas go into the batter.

Before it can go into the oven, we need the streusel layer. Oats, flour, sugar, cinnamon and walnuts.

Add with a bit of butter to the mixer..

And you get a nice crumbly streusel.

The batter alone, look at all that fruit.

Streusel layer goes on top.

After it comes out of the oven it's nice and brown. But we're not done yet!

Cream cheese, butter, cream, and powdered sugar all go into the mixer to make a glaze.

A handy tip for serving cakes from the round packages. You can snip the string along the edge in 4 places around the circumference, and pull the sides right off, leaving the cake on a cardboard disk with a parchment paper disk on top. Makes for much easier serving if you're portioning it all out right away.

Mmmm, light golden sides, crumbly toasted top, and sweet drizzled glaze.

Cut into it and you can see all those delicious pieces of fruit. They give a wonderful fruity flavor to a light spiced cake with just the right amount of substance. The flavors are really complex, from the citrus in the sugar, to the sultanas, pears, and apple. The ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg give the cake itself a great taste.

Moist and delicious!