Red Wine Pear Cake

After making these mini pear rustics, I still have a few pears left. So I went online to search for recipes that I could use for the remaining pears. The beautiful picture of red wine pear cake from this site caught my attention and as I have all the ingredients on hand, I started baking immediately. I made half portion using a tiny 12-cm cake pan that I got from my recent trip to Tokyo. Everything went well until the end of mixing process, the batter seems dry to me and so I decided to add some yogurt to "loosen" up the batter. It turned out to be a great decision, as the cake was moist and tasted really good with the poached pears.

Red Wine Pear Cake Recipe
Recipe adapted from here

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (125ml) red table wine
1.5 cups (375ml) water
1/2 cinnamon stick
2 pears, peeled
1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar
75g butter
1/4 cup (50g) brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cups (112g) self-raising flour
50g almond meal
1/2 tbs ground ginger
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/8 cup (30ml) milk
2 tablespoons plain yogurt

Method:
1) In a saucepan, combine red wine, water, pears and cinnamon. Let it simmer for 20 minutes. Remove the pears, add 1/2 cup of castor sugar to the saucepan and boil the syrup for 15-20 minutes. In the mean time, halves and cores the pears.
2) Preheat the oven to 180 deg C. Lightly grease and line a 12-cm round cake pan with baking paper.
3) Mix flour, almond meal, ground ginger and mixed spice in a bowl. Set aside.
4) Using an electric mixer, mix butter and brown sugar in a medium bowl until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Fold in flour mixture, following by milk and yogurt, mix until well combined.
5) Spoon the batter into the cake pan and smooth the surface. Press the base of the pear halves into the cake mixture, standing them upright.
6) Bake in preheated oven for 40-45 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Drizzle the cake with red wine syrup. Serve.