I love this autumnal cake from Konditor and Cook. It's not the prettiest cake you've ever seen but it's possibly the tastiest, delicious served warm as a pudding or as a slice of cake with a cup of tea. All I’ve done to the Konditor recipe is to veganise it – it’s just as sticky and delightful as the original.
Ingredients:
For the cake:
250g plain flour
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
175g light brown sugar
200ml soya milk
175g dairy free margarine
175g black treacle
6 tbsp aqua faba (water from a tin of chickpeas or beans)
For the pears:
200g light brown sugar
2 or 3 small pears, peeled, quartered and cored
Heat the oven to 150 degrees C/gas mark 2 and line a 10 inch cake tin with foil.
Start by peeling, quartering and coring the pears. Put the 200g sugar in a pan over a medium heat. Don’t stir it but as the sugar liquefies at the edges, drag this to the centre. Once all the sugar has melted into a dark caramel, pour it into the lined tin and place the pears in a fan shape with the rounded part of the pear facing down into the caramel. Be careful with the caramel as it will be extremely hot.
To make the cake, sift the flour with the spices and bicarbonate of soda and set aside. Slowly heat the brown sugar and milk in a pan until the sugar has dissolved.
Beat the margarine and treacle together with an electric mixer, then add in the aqua faba, then the flour. Finally pour in the hot milk mix and blend to a runny batter.
Pour the mixture over the pears in the tin and bake for about an hour until a skewer comes out clean. Leave the cake to cool in the tin for an hour, then turn it upside down and gently remove the foil, taking care not to tear the pears away with the foil.
