Pear-Cardamom Coffee Cake

When Corey and I moved in together, I talked about wanting to always have some sort of coffee cake around to snack on with tea. In the real world, lunches and dinners for the next couple days comes first, so coffee cake has taken a backseat to lasagna, fried rice, and chili-mac.

Not. Anymore.

With this really easy recipe, I'm confident I can whip up a coffee cake a few times a month. Enter the pears!

Let's talk about cardamom. Cardamom is one of those spices that you encounter the first time (if you're a Westerner) with total delight. The first time I had chai, it was the cardamom that held my attention. I haven't had an opportunity to use it in a recipe recently, so I decided that coffee cake was it's time to shine.

This is a super simple recipe -- no creaming of butter and sugar, you just mix together everything dry, throw in everything wet, and stir. It turns into more of a dough than a batter, so don't keep mixing to thin it out or it will become too chewy. The cake is very light in flavor, almost white, and incredibly moist. The pears slice under your fork like butter, but hold their shape under the deliciously sweet, spicy topping.

As you can see, mine developed a really sturdy crust. That's because I baked it for an hour (I was waiting for the topping to brown). I changed the original recipe to include more Earth Balance and sugar in the topping so that it would brown faster.

Pear Cardamom Coffee Cake (adapted from Lanier B&B)

(serves 9)

Ingredients:

Cake: 
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup Earth Balance, melted
3/4 cup soymilk
2 Ener-G Eggs
1 tsp almond extract

1-2 firm pears, sliced

Topping:
2/3 cup flour
5 Tbl Earth Balance, melted
5 Tbl brown sugar
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp salt

1. Grease and flour an 8" x 8" pan. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together dry ingredients for cake, add wet ingredients and mix. Spread in the bottom of the pan.

2. Arrange the pear slices on top of the cake.

3. Mix the topping ingredients and sprinkle over the pears evenly. Bake for 40 minutes. Serve very warm.