HCB: Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake

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Besides my love affair with chocolate cakes, I have a love affair with the TYPE of texture of the cake.  I like mine to be dense – a la pound cake consistency.

Those airy cakes – Not GOOD

The heavy cakes – GOOD

Those types of cakes remind me of my grandmother’s homemade cakes, heavy on the butter, eggs, with a bit of sour cream to give it a tangy taste.

Yep, those cakes are close to my heart.

So when I flipped to this weeks Heavenly Cake choice and read up, I was pumping fist in the air and yelling around the house – SCORE!

Ok, I may or may not have done that.  (The cats aren’t talking)

Not even the fact that it had a fruit in there could damper my expectations for it, because according to this, the pears would disappear through the cake, end up at the bottom, which will then be the top and well… its all a bit like maaaagic.

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FFwD: Marie-Helene's Apple Cake

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The apple is the most cultivated tree fruit and the most used by humans.  There are more than 7,500 known variety of apples. The United States grows 2,500 of these, but just 100 of them are grown commercially. Apples are grown in 36 U.S. states, but six states — Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia — produce the vast majority.  

Want to impress your friends with your uncanny knowledge of this autumn favorite?

  • Apples float because 25 percent of their volume is air.

  • It takes nearly 40 apples to make 1 gallon of cider.

  • You could eat a different apple every day for more than 19 years, and never eat the same kind twice!

  • The “Delicious” apple variety is the most widely grown variety in the United States.

  • An apple tree has to grow for four or five years before it will produce an apple.

  • Bobbing for apples started as a Celtic New Year’s tradition to determine whom you would marry.

  • In ancient times, apples were thrown at weddings (instead of rice or birdseed, like today … ouch!).

  • The apple belongs to the rose family.

When you Google “apple recipes” you are bound to get more than 40,900,000 hits.  There are a lot of people using a lot apples out there.

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HCB: Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes

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The first weekend of the months are the hardest for me when it comes to baking.  My commitment to three baking groups makes it a bit hard, since I technically have 3 dessert to bake during the first weekend.  So usually during this time one tends to fall of the to bake list.  Since I had passed last weeks choice on HCB, I could not bring myself to pass on a second week.  One of the other baking club is going to take a hit - the jury still out as to which.

I decided to start with HCB choice, because it was the hardest of the 3.  The pudding portion had 3 pages of instructions, add 4 more if you decided to do the Brioche and you got, once more, 7 pages of instructions ahead of you.  Which mean one thing - hold on to your whisk, its going to be a bumpy bake.  After reading, I realized that after putting into account the waiting time between the steps, I was looking at well over 12+ hours of work for six baby cakes.

God, I thought the Apple Charlotte was hard.
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