I had a rare day at home today with boy no.1 as his school were on strike. Boy no. 2 was at nursery so I saw this as the perfect opportunity to do some baking.
We were away visiting family at the weekend and were very kindly given 3 carrier bags full of freshly picked pears.
I was keen to bake with the pears and flicked through my latest cook book, Delia's Cakes. I came across this recipe and decided to give this a go.
The cake is very simple to bake. The cake itself is made using self raising flour, baking powder, butter, golden caster sugar, ground almonds, an egg, almond extract, pinch of salt and 3 tablespoons milk.
Once combined using an electric whisk, you simply spoon the batter into a lined 20cm cake tin, level the top with a tablespoon, and add 2 peeled, cored and sliced pears on top.
The instructions were a bit ambiguous, Delia instructs you to arrange the pears in a circle on top and states that a few can go in the middle. I was unsure what she meant by this, and simply placed the pear slices going from the middle to the edge all the way round. It's a bit hard to explain but it looked good when finished.
The streusel topping was the final step, which is made using self raising flour, demerara sugar, melted butter and flaked almonds which you sprinkle over the top of the pears.
The cake was baked for 45 mins (we popped out to pick up boy no. 2 from nursery whilst the cake was in the oven!) and left to cool.
A good tip from Delia is to use a palette knife to remove the baking parchment from the cake before sliding onto a wire rack to cool. I don't actually own a palette knife so used a long knife and this worked just as well.
The cake was delicious, we sprinkled it with icing sugar and served it with raspberry flavoured clotted cream ice cream. Yum.
