Pear and Mincemeat Crumble Cake.

Happy new year everyone and hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a great holiday. I had a great time over the holiday and ate way to much tasty food.
I also received lots of cool gifts. and as I mentioned in my last blog my friends know me so well so I receive allot of cupcake themed gifts. One in particular that I liked was just a small gift my Boyfriend got me as a joke, see I'm a very clumsy person and I'm forever hurting, cutting or burning myself so he thought that these might come in handy:

Inside it's full of different size plasters with Cupcakes on!

I also got a sewing machine for Christmas which I thought was really cool so as well as baking this week I've also been attempting to make my first dress and It's nearly finished.

With new year gone and my resolutions made I then headed to the kitchen to bake something that would make me break at least one of my many resolutions by making me eat copious amounts of cake. Usually at Christmas I run out of mincemeat before I've made all the mince pies I want however this year I stocked up on the stuff a little to much and found myself with a jar and a half left so I wanted a recipe that would use up some of it to save it hanging around in my cupboard.
I could have just made more mince pies, but I was a little bored with them so I went searching for a recipe and I found one using Good Food's cake app for the I phone. It's a brilliant little app that I made my boyfriend download for me, It has loads of cake recipes and when you select one it shows you all the information you need, you can save the recipe to a favorites section, add the ingredients to a shopping list and even set a timer to use whilst the cake is baking. So I found a recipe for a pear and mincemeat crumble cake and here it is!

It has chunks of spiced pears and little pockets of mincemeat and It's just delicious eaten warm with custard.

Here's how it's made:

For the pears:
4 firm pears cored and cut into thumb size pieces
3 Tbsps Golden caster sugar
1 Tsp Mixed spice

For the cake:
250g Salted butter
250g Golden caster sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract
5 Large eggs
200g Self raising flour
100g Ground almond
7 Tbsp Plain Flour
6 tbsp Mincemeat


Put the pears into a non stick frying pan with 2 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp water. Cover and cook on a medium heat for 10 mins until just tender, stirring every so often. Once the pears are cooked there shouldn't be any juices. (If there is a bit of juice left drain this away.) Add the mixed spice and leave to cool.

Heat the oven to 160 deg C. Butter and line a 20cm round, deep cake tin. Put butter sugar and  into a large bowl and beat together until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs and flour and beat until smooth, then fold in the ground almond with a spoon. Remove 85g of cake batter and put into a small bowl. Into this add the plain flour and chop together with a cutlery knife to make a soft crumbly mix.

Spoon half the cake mix into the tin, top with half the pears, dot over half the mincemeat then dollop the rest of the cake mix on top. Scatter with remaining pears and mincemeat then top with the crumble mix. Sprinkle with 1 tbsp Sugar and bake for 1 1/2 hours covering with foil after an hour, until golden and baked through. Cool in the tin for 10 mins then cool on a wire rack.

And that's it!

I really didn't have a deep enough cake tin so I filled the tin I had as much as I could leaving a little of everything behind, then I used the left over mixture and fruit to make individual cupcake version which turned out just as nice. Here they are:

And here's a slice of cake ready and waiting to be covered in custard and eaten:

My favorite bit is when you hit a pocket of mincemeat. I really love this recipe as it still gives you all those warm wintery flavours but It's just so much more interesting than mince pies. In fact I'm going to make this cake again at the weekend however substituting apples for the pears because even though I only made this the other day it was passed around family and disappeared very quickly.

Well that's it for now, good luck in keeping to all your resolutions and keep baking regardless.

Cupcake kris 

xxxx