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Bakeroise

February 16, 2022

Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Caps

Affiliate Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting Bakeroise.

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.

Dehydrated candy cap mushrooms

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.

Warren pears from Kiyokawa Orchards

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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Vegan Upside Down Pear Cake with Crushed Candy Cap

Print Recipe

My veganized take on Mark Bittman’s Upside Down Pear Cake that uses good olive oil instead of eggs and has crushed candy cap mushrooms in the cake batter.

  • Author: Jan Carlisle @ Bakeroise
  • Cook Time: 50
  • Total Time: 50 minutes
  • Diet: Vegan

Ingredients

Scale
  • 11 tablespoons unsalted vegan butter, divided
  • ¼ cups packed or 49 grams of organic light brown sugar
  • 3 pears, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
  • ¾ cups or 172 grams organic cane sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • ½ cup good olive oil
  • 1 ½ cups or 320 grams of cake flour
  • 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
  • ½ cup unsweetened vegan milk
  • ½ tablespoon of fresh ground candy cap mushroom 

 

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
  2. Bring a small pan to medium heat. Melt three tablespoons of the vegan butter and immediately add the brown sugar. Cool until brown sugar is dissolved.
  3. Bring heat to a boil and cook for another 1-2 minutes, stirring to prevent sticking and burning. When done, remove from heat and set aside.
  4. When the mixture has cooled down, pour into a 9-inch, parchment-lined baking pan and arrange the pear slices in an overlapping circle on top, starting from the middle, making a pattern resembling a pinwheel.
  5. Add the remaining eight tablespoons of unsalted vegan butter and organic cane sugar into the standing mixer’s bowl. Using whisk attachment, beat the remaining vegan butter and the organic cane sugar on high until light and fluffy.
  6. Add the vanilla extract and olive oil gradually. Keep mixing until smooth.
  7. In another large bowl, combine cake flour, baking powder , ground candy cap mushrooms and salt.
  8. Alternate adding cake flour mixture and vegan milk into the butter mixture, three times.
  9. With a spatula, carefully and evenly spread batter over the pears, careful not to disturb the pears.
  10. Bake on middle rack in oven for 50 minutes or until a light to medium golden brown.
  11. Insert toothpick in the middle of of the cake to test for doneness. If dry, it’s done. Let cake cool for 5 minutes. If it’s not dry, let bake for another 5-10 minutes or until done according to toothpick test.
  12. After 5 minutes of cooling in a pan; put a plate on top of cake and carefully flip it so plate is on bottom and pan is on top. Let sit in a covered container overnight to let the flavors settle and develop. 
  13. Before serving, add a dusting of powdered sugar on top, letting it soak into the pear slices on top.

Did you make this recipe?

Share a photo and tag us — we can’t wait to see what you’ve made!

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