Pear and Cardamom Cake

With the Christmas season galloping towards us - it's good to have a few easy to make recipes up your sleeve that are still smart enough to serve as a dessert over the festive season.

This is a grown up cake with subtle flavors that linger. It just needs a scoop of good vanilla ice-cream or even better, a little quenelle of mascarpone cream. The pear in this recipe works beautifully. It moistens and subtly flavours the cake, complimenting the other flavours. The amaretti biscuits and ground almonds give a gentle note of almond while the coffee and cardamom give an initial burst of flavour before blending gently into the background.

This is an 'objet trouvé' sort of a recipe - from an advertisement promotion for DeLonghi, (hence the coffee I suppose) in Delicious Magazine.  Very pretty on the plate with it's cobweb of chocolate, and it is, indeed, delicious.

Pear and Cardamom Cake with Coffee and Amaretti

Ingredients:
175g softened butter
175g light muscavado sugar
3 medium eggs
50g ground almonds
1 tsp freshly ground cardamom
175g self raising flour
2 tbsp espresso coffee
3 ripe pears, peeled, deseeded and cut into chunks
4 amaretti biscuits, roughly crushed
75g dark chocolate

Method:
Preheat the oven to 190C
grease and line a 20cm loose-bottomed tin
Cream together the butter and the sugar until pale and fluffy
Beat in the eggs one at a time
Fold in the ground almonds, cardamom, flour, coffee, and 2/3 of the chopped pears until well combined
Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface
Scatter the remaining pears and 2/3 of the amaretti biscuits over the top and bake for 1 hour until risen and cooked. If you insert a skewer into the centre it should come out clean
Allow the cake to cool completely
Remove the cake from the tin and place onto a serving platter. Scatter over the remaining biscuits.
Melt the chocolate and drizzle over the top of the cake