Cake #27 - Pear and Oatmeal Cake

Wednesday Natural Ingredient / Healthy Cake - Pear and Oatmeal Cake.

I got a 1 kg bag of pears for 49 cents. Gotta love these offers:  Aldi "Super 6" and similar promotions in Dunnes Stores and Tesco. And now even in my local Londis they have (bags of) fruit and veggies for 49 or 69 cents. With these prices we never run out of vitamins! Plenty of carrots to be put in the sons' lunchboxes, bags of spinach and kale for smoothies to be made by the daughters, apples to take to the teachers and potatoes for the rainy day.

Apples and oats go well together so why not combine pears and oats to make a cake. This time I simply googled for a recipe and found this Pear Oatmeal Cake from The Australian Women's Weekly website. I followed the recipe with a few exceptions:

- I used 4 fresh pears instead of canned ones.

- As I did not have syrup from canned pears I added 100 ml of apple juice to the dough. I did not heat the juice with the oats but added the oats simply together with the flour and soda.

- Also, I only used white self-raising flour.

And it worked great! This is definitely one of the tastiest cakes I have made during the past month. The ginger makes it sophisticated in a way and pouring some dark baking syrup on top just before serving gave the cake some extra moist. Maybe it would have been more moist with the canned pears - but, again, why to use canned fruit when you have fresh ones.

When I had got the cake fresh from the oven and poured some syrup on top I suddenly smelled a wet dog in my kitchen. Now that I finally got used to the smell of my herb pots and have stopped blaming the cats, another pet episode comes up? - We do not have a dog but there is one or two daughters in the family who would love to have a dog. So it was time to get suspicious again. Any little wet dogs smuggled into the house? Wardrobes, check. Toilets, check... No barking, it was my healthy cake and the combination of its earthy aromas this time...