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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HCB: The Bostini

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Internet, after months and months, and plenty of baking from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, and as my fellow baker, Mendy, dully noted on last week comments: “The Bostini has landed”.

This dessert has been patiently waiting in the wings for quite some time now. Even while some of the Heavenly Cake Bakers venture off the path and made it during the free choice week and gave the rest of us a small peak of what this dessert could be.

And what could it be?

Dear heaven above - THIS IS GOOD.

Ok, good is not a worthy word to describe this.  Maybe excellent? Nah, not good enough… How about first-class? Nope, does not do it justice.  Superior? Outstanding? Tremendous? Or maybe we can just call it simply brilliant.

Yep, that is it – BRILLIANT.

Because, this little cup has a whole lot to make it brilliant.

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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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