Pearful, but Hearty

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A cake for any special occasion. Make it, and you’ll see what I mean (Rcp# 75)

Ingredients for ‘Pearful, but Hearty’

For the Cake Base:

  • 200 g amaranth whole grain flour
  • 70 g buckwheat flour
  • 70 g banana flour
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon locust bean gum
  • 110 g plant-based ‚butter‘
  • 5 tablespoons of a mild canola oil (plus some for oiling the forms)
  • 70 g coarse oatmeal (rolled oats)
  • 70 g coconut blossom sugar
  • 2 tablespoons apple pulp (thick, pure applesauce without additives)
  • 1 (over-)ripe) banana, peeled and mashed
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1 knife tip each of bourbon vanilla powder, dried ginger powder, and ground cinnamon
  • A pinch of salt
  • 75ml cold water
  • You will also need: Two springform cake pans with 18cm diameter

For the Sauce:

  • 4 tablespoons apple pulp (thick, pure applesauce without additives)
  • 3 tablespoons drinking water
  • 5 tablespoons dried and salted tomatoes, cut into very small pieces (2-3 mm x 2-3 mm max)
  • 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a clean jar with lid, plus the following finely minced herbs:
    • 10-15 fresh basil leaves
    • ½ teaspoon savory (fresh or dried, just a little less than a full spoon)
    • 3 – 4 large sage leaves (or ½ teaspoon dried sage, just a little less than a full spoon)
    • 1/2 teaspoon bear‘s garlic in oil/1/2 teaspoon frozen bear‘s garlic (or ½ teaspoon dried bear‘s garlic from beginning)

For the Crumbles:

  • 100 g plant-based hard cheese alternative (e.g., made from almonds), grated
  • 50 g precooked and crumbled maroni (edible chestnuts)

For the Fruit Topping

  • 3 big or 4-6 small – medium pears (about 650 – 720g, depending on the size of the fruits), ripe, but still easily slicable
  • bath for pears
    • 100 ml drinking water
    • 1 tablespoon coconut blossom sugar (dissolve in water)
    • ½ teaspoon lime juice

Preparations and Baking Instructions for ‘Pearful, but Hearty’

  1. Combine banana purée, apple pulp, sugar, lime juice, honey, and spices in a large bowl. Add water. Stir well.
  2. Mix all the flours, and make two small holes in the pile of flour. Put the baking powder in one and the locust bean gum in the other. Mix well.
  3. Gradually add the flour mix to the pulp and spice mixture. Knead until no liquid remains.
  4. Add the butter, in flakes, on the side of the bowl, to the dough. Then, add the canola oil and the oats. Mix and knead well until smooth. Let stand in a cool place for at least 2 hours (or overnight).
  5. Mix the ingredients for the sauce in the jar and put it aside (cool, if you do not want to use it right away).
  6. Knead the grated ‘cheese’ together with the crumbled maroni. Put into the fridge to cool.
  7. Preheat the oven to 175 °C (fan assisted, no top or bottom heat added).
  8. Divide the dough into two equal portions, and put each into an 18cm diameter oiled springform pan. Roll out and press flat onto the bottom. Leave no ridge on the sides, but make a plain base. Pour half of the sauce onto each dough bed and spread it evenly. Careful not to smother too much onto the sides. This will burn. Then, put the cake pans into the oven on a cake rack (medium height) and bake them for 20 minutes, while you prepare the pears.
  9. Prepare the pear bath and set it aside in a soup plate. Wash the pears and cut the cores out. Then, cut them – with peel – gradually into thick slices (2 – 2 ½ cm), which you half. After cutting and halving, immediately bath them in the liquid with sugar and lime juice (the “pear bath”) for about 3-5 minutes. Then, take them out and collect them in another soup plate or two. You need enough space to store the pear slices and have to be able to select the slices by size.
  10. Take the baked cake bases out of the oven and set them on a heat resistant surface. Let cool for 5 minutes so they can be handled without burning yourself. Then, sprinkle the small dried and salted tomato pieces evenly on the bottom of each form over the cake base. After that, arrange the pear slice halves onto the dough base. Start from the outside with the biggest pieces in both cake pans, then gradually move inside the circle, taking smaller and smaller pear fragments. After the cakes are fully covered with pears, put the cakes back into the oven, onto the cake rack, medium height again, for another 15 minutes.
  11. Take the cakes out and, again, set them onto a heat resistant surface, where you let them cool for 5 minutes to be safely handled. Take out the crumbles from the fridge and knead them back together into a smooth dough. From that dough, you make evenly sized crumbles, which you sprinkle onto both cakes. After that, you return the cakes to the oven for another 10 minutes.
  12. Take the cakes out of the oven and let them cool down to handwarm before you remove the ring from the forms. Then, let them cool down completely, before removing them from the bottom plate.
Yeah, I know … Trust me, it tastes just like it looks.

Side Notes:

  1. You can eat this cake with two or three tablespoons of coconut yogurt for dessert or at tea time. Or, you can combine it with a salad and eat it for lunch. Or, you can rewarm it and add a hot protein source and vegetables, sort of like a replacement for potatoes or any other starchy addition. So, basically, you can eat this cake at any time of the day and on any occasion. If there is no occasion, invent one. Because this cake will make it as special as any cake can.
  2. This was one of the paths I took on my baking expedition in the fall of 2023, which I described in the post “Using up the flour.” This recipe also shows how I combined different types of “egg replacements” (I called them “noegkX”). You can find the corresponding post about noegkX under [“NoegkX – No Fun?”]
  3. Incidentally, the distant blueprint for this recipe (main ingredients: wheat flour, beet sugar, eggs, and butter from cow’s milk) came from my first cookbook, which my dad gave me when I started college. The cookbook contains traditional recipes from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria (thanks to duct tape, I still have it). My father, a trained chef, wrote a dedication on the inside cover of the cookbook that still makes me smile when I open it: “The way to a person’s heart may (sometimes) be through their stomach.”

Please note: For all my recipes (text) on this blog (By MagS, Parsley-Lane Blog) I grant a CC license under the terms of BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further explanations, please see the Legal Notice or visit creativecommons.org.