Apple and Pear Cake FAIL

I needed to use up some more apples and pears from my Boston Organics delivery, so I decided to try Smitten Kitchen's Mom's Apple Cake. Except I didn't have a tube pan. Or a bundt pan. And I only had 2 apples and 2 pears. And I accidentally bought white whole wheat flour instead of my usual unbleached all-purpose flour. A normal person might have decided these reasons were enough to stop, but oh no, I had to go ahead and try to make the cake anyways.

First conversion: I figured I could multiple all the ingredients by 3/4 to account for the fact that I only had 4 pieces of fruit instead of the 6 required for the recipe.

First fail: You know how people say baking is like chemistry and that everything needs to be measured precisely? Well, I had to adjust some of the calculated measurements just so I could measure them. And I ended up with a really, really, really thick batter. Like closer to cookie dough than cake batter. I don't think that's right.

Second conversion: Instead of using a tube pan, I used a normal square pan. In the original post, Deb says that you can probably make the cake in a 9"x13" cake pan if you don't have a tube pan. I figured since I was reducing the quantities in the recipe, I could get away with a 9" square pan.

Second fail: I think the reason this cake calls for a tube pan is because it take a long time for the middle to bake. And maybe longer because I had that ridiculously thick batter. The original recipe says to bake for 1.5 hours or until a tester comes out clean. Um, at 1.5 hours, the middle of the cake was just barely starting to set, and the edges were all getting burnt.

(By the way, The Kitchn just posted a hack on what to do if you don't have a tube pan!)

Third conversion: I only had 1/4 cup all-purpose flour left, so I used that and then used whole wheat flour for the rest of the flour. I figured, it's a cake with fruit so it's already slightly healthy anyways. Can't make that much of a difference right? Um, yeah. Don't ever do what I did, okay? Unless you like eat really dense cardboard.

But, I was still able to get some decent pictures of the thing. And I still did eat it. At least, the top half of it. The bottom half was unsalvageable. Hmmm, I should've taken a picture of what was leftover in the pan.

Anyways, instead of posting the fail recipe, I'm just going to link over to Smitten Kitchen again. Because she has the correct recipe AND gorgeous pictures.

ETA:  Three years later, I finally conquered this recipe by using the right ingredients and baking pan.

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