Helen Goh's Pear Cake with Rye and Ginger

Happy New Year one and all!  

I have been delving through my draft posts and found this magnificent Helen Goh recipe from Good Weekend for Pear Cake with Rye and Ginger.  It looks so good that I think it deserves to see the light of day.

The highlight flavours of this cake are treacle and stem ginger.  I just happened to have a jar of stem ginger that I had bought on speck from the South Melbourne Market, so this cake was begging for mew to make it.

Just look how moist and lush this cake is inside: 

It is a perfect winter cake, though I would be happy to eat it all year round (including now, in Australia's summer).

To make this cake, you will need:

160g butter, cubed

220g brown sugar

150g black treacle

100g ginger syrup drained from a jar of stem ginger

200ml milk

60ml vegetable oil

2 eggs

100g stem ginger, chopped

150g dark rye flour

100g plain flour

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

1 tablespoon ginger

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon mixed spice

3 ripe pears, peeled  and cored; chop half of the pears into 1/2 cm cubes and the rest into thin slices to decorate the top of the cake

Preheat your oven to 190 degrees Celsius and grease and line a 23cm cake tin.

Put the butter, ginger syrup treacle and brown sugar into a medium saucepan over low heat and stir until the butter and sugar have melted and the ingredients are well combined.  Remove the pan from the heat.

 

Whisk in the milk and oil, and then the eggs.  Fold in the stem ginger and set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the flours, bicarbonate of soda and spices, then pour over the wet ingredients and combine with a rubber spatula.  Fold through the cubed pears.

Scrape the batter into the prepared cake tin and arrange the sliced pears in a pattern on top of the cake.   Bake the cake in the preheated oven for 60-80 minutes or until cooked through.  Remove the cake from the oven and allow it to cool on the rack in the tin for around 15 minutes before unmoulding it from the tin and allowing it to cool completely before serving.