An utterly delicious sticky pear and hazelnut cake
Plus, I show you how to make a beautiful, endlessly useful cake without really using a recipe. Just freewheel and make it your own.
Welcome to Pen and Spoon! Apologies the newsletter is late this week - I gave myself food poisoning on Friday so testing and writing about food absolutely wasn’t possible for a couple of days! This week I offer everyone a basic, endlessly useful recipe for a cake that you can make your own. For paid subscribers there’s a glorious recipe for a pear and hazelnut cake that’s perfect for late autumn. Just click below to subscribe - it costs around 96p per week if you take out an annual subscription!
When I was a little girl taking piano lessons, the amount of practice I did was inversely proportional to my musical ambitions. I had no desire to be a concert pianist or teach or even pass exams; my burning desire was to be able to play by ear. I wanted to be the gal who could sit at the piano and knock out a tune on request, to need nothing more than a few bars hummed before my brain sent the music spilling out my fingertips.
Reader, it never happened, but I have learned to cook by ear. By that I mean I’ve learned the skills and gained the confidence to make a meal or a dessert or a bake without the score - the recipe - sitting in front of me. That’s not to say there aren’t general rules of thumb that are wise to follow, and some basics to bear in mind (unless your musical or food preferences incline to the avant-garde). And I follow the recipes of food writers I love regularly, because I will always, always learn something. But knowing how to freewheel in the kitchen is liberating.
The truth is that many of the ingredients in formal recipes aren’t foundations on which the dishes will stand or fall; oftentimes one thing can readily be substituted for another (and sometimes the dish will be better for it). That’s because many recipes share the same basic framework, the difference between them being trills and flourishes. Understanding this means you can pull together a symphony of a meal with whatever you have in the fridge and/or larder - without a score.
Baking is one kind of of cooking where precision is widely recommended, but there’s room within this idea for freewheeling, too. The pound cake is a great example. It dates to the 18th century, and in its original form involved combining a pound each of flour, eggs, sugar and fat to make the batter. That’s a serious amount of cake, and quite a dense and plain one at that (I’ve tried it). So the idea evolved.
Plain freewheeling cake
My go-to freewheeling cake recipe involves equal weights of sugar, eggs, fat and self-raising flour. I’ve adopted Nigella Lawson’s method of pulsing everything together in a food processor. So long as you pulse, and not don’t over-blitz it, your cake crumb won’t be tough.
This makes enough batter for a cake made in a 20cm square baking tin or a 20cm round cake tin. Slather it with icing if you wish, or just enjoy the joy of eating it warm, straight from the oven.
175g sugar
175g eggs (weighed out of their shells, which approximately equals 3 large ones)
175g self raising flour
175g unsalted butter
PLUS 1 tsp baking powder
PLUS a pinch of salt
PLUS enough liquid to make the batter drop easily off the end of the spoon
Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm square baking tin or 20cm round cake tin with oil or butter and line the base with baking paper.
Place all the ingredients except the liquid in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until just combined. Add enough of the liquid, pulsing between additions, to make a batter that drops easily off the end of a spoon.
Scrape into the prepared baking tin and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out.
But this is just the starting point: you can vary the flavour, texture and moistness of the cake by tweaking these ingredients.
Sugar: use all caster sugar, or a mixture of caster and dark brown, light brown, or muscovado. Replacing the whole lot with a darker sugar will give your bake more caramel, treacly notes, a darker colour, and denser too (don’t do it if you’re after a light Victoria sponge-like texture).
Eggs: not all medium or large eggs weigh the same, so this is a guide. If three eggs weight a bit less than 175g, that’s fine - you can achieve the correct batter consistency with your liquid.
Flour: I use self-raising, but if you want to use plain, add an extra 2 tsp baking powder.
You can mix up the flours. Completely or partly substitute white flour for spelt, or wholemeal, for example.
You can replace some or all of the flour for finely ground nuts - the more of the flour you replace, the dense it will be. I love using ground hazelnuts, almonds and pistachios. Fine polenta is also lovely.
For a chocolate-flavoured sponge, take away 3 tablespoons or more of the flour and replace with 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder.
Fat: use unsalted butter. Or replace it partly or completely with vegetable oil (for a delectably moist chocolate cake) or olive oil.
Liquid: use milk, natural or plain Greek yoghurt, sour cream, creme fraiche, fruit juice or cordial (if you use cordial, subtract some of the sugar).
UPGRADES:
Add 1/2 - 1 tsp of liquid flavourings to the batter, like vanilla paste or extract, almond extract, rosewater or orange water.
Add the finely grated zest of a lemon or orange.
Add 1/2 to 1 tsp spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spice etc
Add a handful of dried fruit, chopped if large.
Sticky pear and hazelnut cake
This is a totally delicious variation on my basic recipe - you can see where I’ve added and tweaked.