Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps

Today I am sharing with you my Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps. I love baking with ingredients that are from the Pacific Northwest and this recipe is easy and uses both warren pears and candy cap mushrooms, both from Oregon.

These candy caps were given to me by a friend, an avid mushroom hunter. Candy cap mushrooms don’t really have a distinct taste but they sure do have a strong smell. However, when cooking and baking with them, it gives the final product a distinctive sweet, maple scent that even maple syrup itself doesn’t tend to give off – at least not as much.

Pears are in season here in Oregon and I got some Warren pears from Kiyokawa Family Orchards in my Milkrun box so I used those for this recipe.

Since I generally don’t eat pears as snacks, I use them for baking whenever they fall into my lap and I tend to use apples and pears interchangeably.

The Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps recipe is pretty straightforward so you can go directly to the recipe but I wanted to share how I switched up this recipe and built off of the recipe in the New York Times.

I was able to successfully veganize Mark Bittman’s Maple Pear Upside-Down Cake recipe by replacing the following ingredients below.

Butter: Instead of using plain, regular butter, I used Miyoko’s vegan butter, which uses cashews. This, makes the cake not nut-free, and I’ve only tested this with Miyoko’s since that’s my go-to vegan baking butter.

Brown Sugar: To keep it vegan, I used organic light brown sugar. In Bittman’s recipe, the brown sugar listed isn’t specified to be light or dark brown. The difference in taste between the two sugars is obvious. In short, dark brown sugar is much sweeter and has an almost molasses flavor. Light brown sugar is sweet enough but significantly less sweet than brown.

Sugar: I made sure to use organic cane sugar as conventional sugar is filtered through bone char for coloring.

Large eggs: I replaced each of the two eggs in the original recipe with ¼ cup of good olive oil. I used the Partanna Sicilian Extra Virgin Olive Oil – the same one I use for pizza sauce.

Milk: I pretty much use any unsweetened vegan milk for baking recipes. Unsweetened soy or unsweetened almond milk are great contenders. They have neutral enough flavors that they don’t affect the overall taste of the cake. Don’t use anything like sweetened oat milk or coconut milk out of a can because they will completely change the taste of what we originally wanted.

Aside from veganizing the recipe, I made additional changes:

I wanted the pears in this Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps recipe to be almost overripe. In the past, I’ve noticed that when baking with apples and pears, the less ripe fruit obviously held their shapes more. However, what I wanted wasn’t necessarily aesthetics of the sliced fruit but for the melt-in-your-mouth effect once the food touches the mouth.

Bitmann’s recipe originally called for all-purpose flour but a rule of thumb for me is that when I’m making a cake, I just use cake flour. I’ve tested cakes with both all-purpose flour and even with cakes that aren’t necessarily supposed to be fluffy, the cake flour always yielded better cakes.

I reduced the maple syrup and replaced the taste with scent from the crushed candy caps and powdered sugar dust on top.

Last but not least, I added the candy cap mushrooms. They were dried when given to me and the smell was so entrancing that I decided to grind it up to a powder in my mortar and pestle and use the whole batch. It was about half a tablespoon’s worth.

This Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps recipe was a hit with family and friends. Try out this recipe and let me know what you think!

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