Hazelnut Quince Cake, In Three Acts

As naturally and constantly as I breath or blink, I think about food. There are times when this gastronomic backdrop is a little more distracting than others, like when I recognize a craving that must be sated or when I get something stuck in my head, like figs or cornbread or date sugar, an ingredient or a dish that I can't stop considering until I do something with it. Recently this happened to me with quince. For the last month, quince has been the unholy fruit equivalent of a song that I cannot get out of my head, no matter how hard I try.



I ran into quince at a nearby ginormous Whole Foods that recently expanded and in so doing created a supermarket version of produce heaven. I'd been doing a cartoonish swoon all around the store and had degenerated into stuttering raptures at the tropical fruit section when I spotted the quince. At first I thought it was a stray apple, then I wondered if it wasn't an oddly shaped pear, finally I deduced that it was quince. I was immediately captivated. Certainly, I've read about quince and seen recipes for it, but had never eaten it or cooked with it. Straight into the basket it went.

For the next two weeks, the quince was kind of a running joke. I may have talked about it too much. Friends would come over and point at it, "Is that the quince? Are you ever going to use it?" "How are you? How're the cats? How's your quince?" In that time, just having the quince was like a project. I checked on it every day, waiting for it to be ripe. When ripe, the quince is fragrant, so much so that it used to be employed as a room deodorizer. It is always firm (some describe it as a "rock hard" fruit) even when ripe, but its heady scent is the mark of its ripeness. Daily I sniffed, I prodded, and I thought as it ripened on the window sill. What would be best to do with my quince?



The answer, of course, was cake, or, more precisely, cakes.

Having never had quince, I relied on my reading about it and followed some intuition, which put me on an autumnal flavor palate. Indeed, quince is a fall fruit. Its season runs from September through to December or January, though in some parts of the world it is available for much longer, even into March. Originally, quince grew in the stretch of land between the Caspian and Black seas in the Caucasus region, which dips into Turkey and Iran. It had an early cultivation, which brought it into Mesopotamia where it was known as the "golden apple." Many historians hypothesize that it was quince and not what we know today as an apple that was actually referenced in biblical stories. Certainly, it was considered a godly fruit for the Greeks, who continued its cultivation, carrying it into the Mediterranean.



There are a lot of intriguing ideas for using quince that come out of its Persian and Mediterranean history--stews and sweets especially. Currently most commercial quince crops are located in South America, particularly in Argentina where it is popularly used to make candies and hard jellies or pastes called dulce membrillo, which are used in desserts and as the filling for sandwiches. Quince once enjoyed a good deal of popularity in Europe and America as a good fruit for jellies and sauce since it has naturally high levels of pectin. So that is where I decided to experiment, making a sauce with the quince and some deliciously ripe early fall pears.



The floral fall sweetness of pear is a great complement to the tartness of the quince, which does mellow as it cooks, but often needs some quantity of sugar to be palatable (in a traditionally Western sense anyway). I found raw quince to be not preciously pleasant to eat. It was sharp, astringent and extremely dry in the way that guava is, though it lacks the kind of tropical sweetness guava offers.



Three small peeled and diced bosc pears, a scraped vanilla bean, and a shot of agave went into a saucepan along with the peeled and diced quince to cook down to something more enjoyable. Quince does take its time in softening up from its firm state, but as it does, it becomes even more fragrant and turns a soft rose color. Its texture doesn't get as soft as pears or apples might, but it's actually quite nice combined with the softer fruit, adding another textural element to the sauce.



The sauce was the central player in the cake I had been concieving of, playing with in my mind, thinking through the different possibilities. I let it cool as I worked on putting together a light hazelnut cake to sandwich it with. Though all nuts have a kind of winter/fall feel for me, hazelnuts particularly so, which made them a perfect match to the seasonal quince and pear. While a general rule for combining flavors is "what grows together goes together," seasonal commonality is also a good indicator that ingredients will take to each other. In this case, it turns out that hazelnuts and quince satisfy the "grow together" maxium as well as sharing a seasonal tie, since they too were originally found in the Caucasus region and are harvested in September and October.



To get a lot of hazelnut flavor without a heavy cake, I used a toasted hazelnut oil and some hazelnut liqueur instead of actual nuts in the cake. The result was just what I wanted, light, nutty, softly rich. Slivered hazelnuts made a nice garnish for the cake and gave a bit more of the hazelnut flavor without overwhelming the cake. To balance the sweet floralness of the quince and pear filling and to complement the rich hazelnuts, a mocha buttercream seemed like just the thing. And because I couldn't help myself, good dark chocolate drizzled over the whole thing along with some decorative bits of chocolate that I melted on a transfer sheet to get the flower design.



The picture above is of the full-sized version of this cake that I made for my friend Laura's birthday. You can see clearly the thick band of chocolate in this one that I used to wrap the cake. The trick to using transfer sheets in this way (rather than just letting the chocolate cool on them and chopping it up for decoration) is spread the chocolate evenly with an offset spatula and allowing it to set for a few minutes before gently pressing the still soft chocolate into shape around the cake. Then you just need to be patient and let the chocolate cool completely before peeling away the transfer sheet.


Laura's was a four layer cake with alternating fillings. Lacking the time to invest in another quince, but still enamored of it as a fruit, I was thrilled to hit on a jar of German quince jelly, which I spread thickly between some layers while a thick gingered pear sauce made with small speckled pears from the farmer's market filled out the others.



I liked the slightly spicy element of ginger along with the tart-sweet of quince and pear and wondered how it would be as a more pronounced flavor. Tasting some candied ginger along with the quince jelly and nuts, it seemed to me that the strong ginger could easily overpower the cake as I had conceived of it in earlier incarnations. So, instead of the light mocha buttercream, I decided to go all out with a super rich ganache to top the cake. Since I was making mini cakes again I thought that I could probably get away with amping the richness on the cakes as well, but went a bit too far in messing with thing when I decided to use hazelnut milk.



While it may work out well used in a sparing way, my attempt at substituting fresh hazelnut milk (made by pureeing raw hazelnuts with water and then straining out the pulp) for all of the soy milk I had used in the previous recipes, resulted in cakes that were way too heavy. The cake was less cake than it was like some kind of hazelnut candy filling. A delicious candy, but candy none-the-less. This is likely because hazelnuts are so fatty (it's almost all "good fat," but they are among the fattiest of nuts) and it made the cake wet, crumbly, and a little saggy. Luckily, the ganache was useful in holding the cake and fruit all together in one decadent package. Ganache is the great saviour of many a baking mistake.

This incarnation was also too heavy for the quince and pear to shine through, so that missed the point a little bit, but I managed to scratch the quince itch twice, so I might be able to move on now. And anyway, the delight of chocolate with a little bit of fruit and nut was certainly no great burden.