Apple and Mincemeat Cake

This is just the right sort of cake to make in the run up to the festive season. Although it's not the sort of rich or fancy cake that will be eaten around Christmas and New Year, the flavours are good enough to put you in the festive mood, without feeling you are over-indulging too early. It's also a really simple cake to make and one I often fall back on when I'm lacking in imagination or time, especially as my husband always comments on how good it is.

The filling in the middle can be adapted to suit the seasons and the recipe also works really well with fresh fruit, as long as it doesn't exude too much juice during cooking (although even that can be overcome by cooking and draining the fruit first). For a taste of Christmas I used a mixture of mincemeat, dried pears and fresh apples - adding apples cuts through the sweetness of the mincemeat. Using the dried pears was a waste of good ingredients, however, as their flavour was overwhelmed by the mincemeat.

Ingredients
200g mincemeat
2-3 eating apples (peeled cored and diced into pieces about the size of sultanas)
4 dried pear halves (snipped into similar sized pieces with scissors)
150g butter
150g caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten
300g SR flour
2 tablespoons chopped toasted hazelnuts
icing sugar for dusting

Method
Grease and base line a 20cm(8") springform tin. Preheat oven to 180C.

Mix the diced apples and dried pears into the mincemeat and set aside - the acidity of the mincemeat should stop the apples from discolouring.

Melt the butter (I find it easiest to do this in a large mixing bowl, in the microwave, then the dough can be mixed in the same bowl). The butter doesn't need to be hot, just completely liquid. Stir in the  caster sugar, then the beaten egg, then mix in the flour to make a soft spreadable dough.

Take roughly 2/3 of the dough and spread it evenly over the base of the cake tin. Push the dough up the sides of the cake tin a little way (about 2cm), to make a wall to contain the filling. This wall doesn't need to be any thicker than rolled out pastry for a pie - it just holds in any fruit juices.
Spread the mincemeat mixture evenly over the dough base.

Use the remaining dough to top the cake. (The easiest way is to flatten small pieces of dough with your fingers and put them on top of the cake filling, fitting them together as closely as possible but getting an even covering too. It doesn't matter about small gaps as the dough spreads and fills in the holes during baking. I usually start at the edge of the cake and work inwards - the dough is pliable enough to spread easily.)

Sprinkle over the chopped hazelnuts, then bake for 50-60 minutes until firm and golden brown.
Cool in the tin, then dust with a little icing sugar before serving.

This was my last baking session before starting on the Christmas desserts tomorrow, so I'll wish you all

MERRY CHRISTMAS

and

A HAPPY AND HEALTHY 2016!

Pear, Ginger and Lemon Cake

The weather seems to be tipping us prematurely into Autumn, but this is giving me a good excuse to start using the seasonal flavours earlier. I've always preferred Autumnal baking to any other season - I love it when the first British apples, pears and plums appear in the shops, and can be paired with the warm flavour of spices, or used in hot puddings.

Now that I'm only cooking for two, I'm looking for more recipes for small cakes, and for cakes which will keep for more than a couple of days. Good keeping quality generally rules out cakes made with fresh fruit, and while I was looking for dried fruit to use instead, I was quite sad to see that there is a much smaller range available than a few years ago - where did the dried peaches and plums (I don't mean prunes) go? If I asked, I guess I would be told that there was no demand for them, but it's such a shame to be limited when looking for produce. Fortunately dried pears are still available, so I grabbed a pack to make this cake.

When I checked the basic recipe for this cake, I realised that I had scaled it up many years ago from one which was made in a 1lb(small) loaf tin, so it was easy to go back to the original, although I did cut down on the sugar a bit.

Ingredients
200g SR flour
100g butter
75g caster sugar
zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
1 heaped teaspoon ground ginger
100g dried pears, chopped and soaked in hot water for 15 minutes, then well drained
3 balls of preserved stem ginger, washed and finely chopped
1 large egg
2 tablespoons syrup from the ginger jar
milk or yogurt to mix - about 4 tablespoons (I used vanilla flavoured pouring yogurt)
4 unrefined cane sugar cubes roughly crushed (or a tablespoon of Demerara sugar)

Method
Preheat oven to 180C and prepare a small loaf tin - I used a pre-formed paper liner.
Rub the butter into the flour, then stir in the sugar, lemon zest and ground ginger. Add the pears and stem ginger, and mix well to coat the pieces with flour. Then mix in the egg and ginger syrup and enough milk or yogurt to give a soft dropping consistency.
Put the batter into the loaf tin, spread evenly and sprinkle on the sugar.
Bake for about 75 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean.
Cool in the tin for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to finish cooling.

This was a really harmonious blending of flavours and textures; there was the right amount of warmth from the ground ginger, which was balanced by a hint of lemon. The pieces of preserved ginger in the cake gave little bursts of spicy heat and the pears were soft and chewy. My husband usually only says anything about my cooking if he dislikes something, but even he said how good this was!

Pear, Almond and Chocolate Chip Cake

Gluten-free, dairy free and no added fat

The We Should Cocoa challenge this month is hosted by Michelle, of Utterly Scrummy Food for Families, a blog I haven't come across before, but which invites further investigation, with it's detailed posts and bright photographs.

For her theme she has asked us to bake something which contains chocolate in some form, but is gluten-free. I'm not a regular gluten-free baker, although I do occasionally cook for a couple of friends who are gluten-free eaters. As I don't have gluten-free flours in stock (other than cornflour for sauces and gravies), I prefer to find recipes which never contained flour in the first place, rather than try to adapt existing recipes to work with flours which may have different characteristics to wheat flour.

This cake recipe, which is similar to the classic whole-orange and almond cake made famous by Claudia Roden, is adapted from an Annie Bell recipe, and has become my favourite gluten-free cake. It has the bonus of being dairy-free too, although there are some natural fats present from the eggs, almonds and chocolate. It can turn out very moist, which makes it an excellent dessert too, when served with a suitable cream or ice-cream.

Over time, I've made a few changes to Annie Bell's recipe, as I find it rises better if the eggs are separated, and the whisked egg whites folded into the batter. In this version, I used dried pears instead of apricots, left out the cocoa and added 100g of chopped chocolate to give a bigger chocolate hit. I also had a couple of egg whites in the fridge to use up, so instead of 6 whole eggs, I used 5 eggs plus the two extra whites.

Ingredients

225 g dried pears, roughly chopped
5 eggs
2 egg whites
200g caster sugar
225g ground almonds
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon gluten-free baking powder
100g (85% cocoa solids) chocolate, finely chopped (gluten- and dairy-free)

Method
Base line a 20cm (8") deep non-stick loose-based cake tin. Pre-heat oven to 180C.

Simmer the dried pears with 250mls of water, until the fruit is soft and the water almost absorbed. Cool a little, then purée in a food processor or with a stick blender. If necessary, add a little more water so that the final consistency of the purée is thick but not too solid - I like it just a little looser than canned pumpkin purée. Leave to cool completely.

Separate the whole eggs, then beat all the egg whites together until at the soft peak stage. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a second bowl, until pale and thick. Fold the pear purée into the egg yolk mixture, followed by the almonds, baking powder, cinnamon and chopped chocolate. Lastly, add the egg whites, in three portions - stir in the first portion thoroughly then gently fold in the remaining portions, to keep in as much air as possible.

Transfer the batter to the prepared pan, and bake for 50-60 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean, or with only a few moist crumbs clinging - no raw batter. If your fruit purée was a little on the loose side, baking may take a little longer. Immediately run a knife around the edge of the cake, between the cake and the tin, to completely loosen it, but leave in the tin until cold before turning out. Using the knife like this makes sure that if the cake sinks, it does so fairly evenly.

This was a delicious cake with a moist texture, although the pear flavour wasn't strong. The bitter chocolate stopped it being too sweet.

We Should Cocoa is the brainchild of Choclette, at Chocolate Log Blog, and the full set of rules can be found on her blog. Briefly, the aim is to produce something containing some form of chocolate plus the chosen ingredient or task for the month. The host (in this case, Michelle, see above) posts a round-up of all the entries at the end of the month.

Pear, Cranberry and Ginger Cookies

A quick stop-gap bake, before I do something special for the weekend! These cookies can be in the oven within 10 minutes of starting to bake, and I just put the mixing bowl on the scales and weigh in each ingredient in turn. The slowest part was chopping a few dried pears!

I kept to seasonal dried fruits and my October theme of 'spices' and made my usual recipe for cookies made with oil, (from Cookie Madness)using 40g chopped dried pears, 35g dried cranberries and 25g chopped crystallised ginger instead of chocolate and nuts. I also added 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon with the flour.

Unfortunately I forgot I was using the fan oven, and set it to the usual temperature for conventional baking. I think this is the reason why the cookies didn't spread as much as usual - it's the only thing which was different. It didn't affect the flavour though - lots of chewy fruit and lovely tangy little pieces of ginger to bite into.

Pear and Caramel Cookies

Another outing for the 'cookies made with olive oil' recipe from Cookie Madness. I jotted down the quantities of ingredients on a small piece of paper before going into the kitchen, then in my rush to get them into the oven, forgot to use brown sugar. This resulted in a rather pale cookie but as I'd added fudge chips there was still plenty of flavour.

As the additions to the dough, instead of nuts and chocolate, I used 50g of soft dried pears, cut into small pieces, 50g fudge chips and half a teaspoon of ground ginger.

This recipe is different everytime I use it! This time the dough was very dry, so that I could shape it by hand and the cookies also didn't spread very far when baked. Unfortunately, the fudge chips on the outside of the cookie melted in the oven, and left little blobs of caramel sticking to the cookies. Not very nice looking, but no-one really worried about it!

The fudge chips even managed to burst open the cookie in this photo on the left. Because of all the oozing caramel, it was hard to get three good  looking cookies for the top picture!

Never mind - the flavour made up for any shortcomings in the appearance. Chewy and fudgy with just a hint of spice to compliment the flavour of the dried pear. CT didn't notice the pear, but that's not surprising - sometimes I think his palate only recognises chocolate and chilli! FB thought chocolate would be a good extra addition, and I thought some nuts would be good. But we all liked them as they were, too! Must remember the brown sugar next time!