Here I am, again, baking for a dinner on Saturday evening. This time a pleasant Italian-Swedish night. Ohh! So nice finally we could speak Italian and sharing our experience in Sweden.
Gianluca e Kamila are amazing! She is Swedish but she speaks so well Italian that I could easily forget about it. Gianluca is from Bologna so Kamila as also a unmistakeable Bolognese accent.
Their kids can understand and almost speak Italian, English and Swedish…cool! (Almost jealous).
And there were also Simona and Virginia two wonderful “girls”, mom and daughter, from Milan. 😉
So new cake to bake, new challenge, find something that everyone will like:
chocolate.
I like dark chocolate so I wanted to combine with something sweet: pears! Perfect combination.
Recipe
Ingredients:
100g sugar
200g dark chocolate (75%)
4 eggs
130g all porpoise flour
100g unsalted butter
4 pears
1 cup apple apple juice
1/2 cup sweet Marsala
1/4 cup crunched hazelnuts
3 tsp baking powder
3 tsp of chili
1tsp salt
Preheat the oven to 180°C.
Clean, peal and core the pears with a corer tool, put them in a sauce pan in vertical position and cook them with the apple juice and drizzle with the Marsala. Cook until soft. Keep one of them with the stalk.
In a large bowl over some simmering water, melt the chocolate and than add 80g of butter mix until smooth and the chili.
Meanwhile, in a bowl whisk the 4 eggs white with a table spoon of the sugar until stiff.
In an another bowl mix together, the 4 egg yolks and the left butter and sugar until smooth.
Let the chocolate cool down a little than add to the egg´s yolk mix. Whisk until the chocolate will be well incorporate.
Now add the flour, the baking powder, the salt, and whisk it. Add the eggs white and stir gently.
Cut in a half 3 of the 4 pears.
Cover the surface of a springform pan (25cm diameter) with butter.
Put all the final mix into the pan, place the pears in circle and the whole pear with the stalk in the middle.
Sprinkle the surface with the hazelnuts.
Cover the pear in the middle with the aluminum foil and bake the cake for 40 minutes.
